What’s your take on the Foundation? A source has begun reckoning that this multi-billion-dollar beast (Office) will have anything necessary simply bought, but I’m very skeptical, particularly after being in touch with the Foundation for a long time.

I haven’t an idea if there’s a conspiracy going on which — unlike that which the Foundation describes — actually included the Foundation.It’s all becoming rather mysterious.

http://users.bestweb.net/~pogo/vista_cost.html

Yes, as strange as it sounds. I guess they are betting that this could have side effects, but for now both the licensing (royalty-free) and terms of use (commercial) is fine for me. And there is the full source code of the codec (cross-platform). You can easily find links to all that. Frankly, Microsoft needs more guys like that inside the borg.

JPEG 2000? It’s inside riddled with patents. In fact, Microsoft acquired a startup called SeaDragon which implements a subset of JPEG2000. Not sure they’ll do anything with it in the future though (best play : virtual earth zooms). Relation between JPEG2000 and HD/JPEG ? None. HD/JPEG is a very simple codec. (something you can verify if you take a look at the source code). JPEG2000 is the world math wavelets (i.e. modern Fourier) : it’s a monster.

1) Each case is enough different not to fit the same problematic. HD/JPEG is provided with the source code (builds on non-Windows OSes as well). This definitely cannot be compared with OOXML for example.

I’ll admit that I haven’t checked how patents (if any) fit into all of this. Is Microsoft ‘donating’ something? What about JPEG2000?

2) MS-DRM : it’s dying by itself. No need to worry.

For music, DRM is ‘dying’ (as a whole). I’m not sure that filmmakers will permit DRM to ‘die’ quite so quickly though.

3) XPS. That’s part of Windows Vista. I don’t think anyone is expecting to render this stuff the same on something else. Customers will decide if they want to use XPS or not. The network effect pretty, or lack thereof when it comes to XPS, pretty much guarantees this is not a threat for the years to come.

Given Microsoft’s aggressive push to promote its own technologies (watch what they do with Silverlight at the moment), I wouldn’t be apathetic. Complacency cost a lot of companies their relevance.

I kind of disagree on that, on two fronts.

1) Each case is enough different not to fit the same problematic. HD/JPEG is provided with the source code (builds on non-Windows OSes as well). This definitely cannot be compared with OOXML for example.

2) MS-DRM : it’s dying by itself. No need to worry.

3) XPS. That’s part of Windows Vista. I don’t think anyone is expecting to render this stuff the same on something else. Customers will decide if they want to use XPS or not. The network effect pretty, or lack thereof when it comes to XPS, pretty much guarantees this is not a threat for the years to come.