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Commentary by Sean Hollister over at CNet reminds us that Steve Jobs promised to make FaceTime an open standard back when he announced it on June 7th 2010, eight years ago. Sean hasn't forgotten but perhaps everyone else has, especially over at Apple. It probably never will be released as an open standard even now with declining market share. However, as a reminder Sean links to the Youtube video of the WWDC 2010 keynote address where it is announced and provides the relevant quote:
"Now, FaceTime is based on a lot of open standards -- H.264 video, AAC audio, and a bunch of alphabet soup acronyms -- and we're going to take it all the way. We're going to the standards bodies starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard."
As of the time of publications, Apple has not responded to CNet's request for a comment.
(Score: 3, Informative) by danaris on Thursday June 07 2018, @10:45PM (2 children)
Apple got sued by patent trolls over FaceTime. They had to change how it works, and now cannot in any way both practical and legal follow through on what Jobs said.
I thought this was known by...pretty much everyone who would have cared about that promise in the first place.
Dan Aris
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Friday June 08 2018, @03:19AM
Apple *is* a patent troll. A good company would take a troll to court.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday June 08 2018, @09:38AM
That doesn't make sense.
If they were infringing a patent... and then changed it to presumably avoid that patent... it can now be open-sourced whereas before it couldn't.
What you are implying, I think, is that they may have infringed on other patents which, by revealing their code, they might be sued for.
Welcome to the reason that you do patent checks before you create or sell a device or service. It has nothing to do with open-source at all.
If, however, it used licensed technology from other companies, that may be different.
What are we saying here?
- Apple don't want to open source (I think that's true) but could.
- Apple don't own/licence all patents to their technology (proven true)
- Apple aren't "innovative" and don't make the technology themselves, they just licence other people's, so Facetime is really nothing special (probably true).
- If you infringe a patent in secret, nobody knows. If you show your code, other people might find out you've been doing something illegal all along. (Almost certainly true).