With Mozilla’s refusal to include an H.264 codec in Firefox, this was bound to happen sooner or later. Firefox is open source under a variety of licenses, and there are H.264 codecs available under a variety of licenses. Now someone has decided to put them together, and the result is to be called Wild Fox.
Wild Fox is intended to be a build of the Firefox code that closely follows the mainline source code, currently at version 3.6.3, but will include features that have been removed from the main Firefox builds “due to software patents, patents which are only valid in a small number of countries, including the USA and South-Korea”.
The project, which is hosted on Sourceforge, is being maintained by just one person right now and has not released any code, but a (currently empty) SVN repository for the project is available below:
https://wildfox.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wildfox wildfox
The maintainer of Wild Fox, who goes by the name Elledan on the internet, has asked for interested developers to contact her on the sourceforge project page, or on her main web page available here.
While adding H.264 back to the Firefox codebase may seem to be a simple way to get the codec working, it remains to be seen whether or not it will be useful, as most websites will continue to serve Flash or in some cases Theora video to any browser presenting itself with the Firefox user agent.
Why so many projects insist on known embracing patent encumbered software such as those that use h.264 is beyond me. I hate software patents, but the fact is they exist in many countries, including the US, which makes up a HUGE part of the global economy. If Free Software is ever going to be a legitimate competitor to proprietary software, developers have to accept this. No legitimate business in the US is ever going to use software they they KNOW violates patent law.
Adding support via a plugin system is one thing — then the end-user can make the decision to use it or not. But integrating it into core software simply forces it on users that more than likely don’t realize that they are using something that could get them sued. Sure, you could just use regular Firefox, but again, most users don’t know what’s going on behind the curtain. They just know that this software does something cool that Firefox doesn’t. And neither program costs them anything, so why wouldn’t they choose the one with more features?
Projects like this that inappropriately use known patented technology make it that much harder for legitimate projects to compete with the likes of proprietary software.
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