Regarding the patent:
I suggest reading original email to Wikipedia developer mailing list
To quote
"""
On the patent part— Simply being similar to something doesn't imply
patent infringement, Jason is talking out of his rear on that point.
He has no particular expertise with patents, and even fairly little
knowledge of the specific H.264 patents as his project ignores them
entirely. Codec patents are, in general, excruciatingly specific — it
makes passing the examination much easier and doesn't at all reduce
the patent's ability to cover the intended format because the format
mandates the exact behaviour. This usually makes them easy to avoid.
It's easy to say that VP8 has increased patent exposure compared to
Theora simply by virtue of its extreme newness (while Theora is old
enough to itself be prior art against most of the H.264 pool), but
I'd expect any problems to be in areas _unlike_ H.264 because the
similar areas would have received the most intense scrutiny. ... and
in any case, Google is putting their billion dollar butt on the line—
litigation involving inducement to infringe on top of their own
violation could be enormous in the extreme.
""
Dont trust some stupid kids comments for god sake knowledge in programming does not equal legalese.
Wow i fail to understand why you were down voted!
Is HN new place to spread FUD?
Just because some bumpkin developer comments that code is similar to H.264 does not makes it an infringement. Also a company like Google which has thousand times smarter engineers should have surely thought about it before spendin ~125M$
People here are going bonkers over some comment by naive code monkey.
Maybe google has patents enough to coerce MPEGL LA!
who knows, but spreading FUD is bad.
Esp when you are a naive code monkey!
Dont trust some stupid kids comments for god sake knowledge in programming does not equal legalese.