Does Steve Jobs Already Hate the WebM Project from Day One?

Tweet

Let’s face it, folks, we’re not really that surprised to hear that the CEO of Google’s main current rival doesn’t like one of their initiatives. In fact that’s something everyone could have predicted yesterday when the WebM project was unveiled. But should Steve Jobs like the latest open project coming from Mountain View?

That’s really a good question and it looks like a curious person just like us emailed Steve Jobs asking how he felt about the thing:

Hey Steve,

What did you make of the recent VP8 announcement?

Regards,

Kris

In other words, will Apple support WebM later down the road? Will the company include WebM in its future Safari versions for its mobile platform and not only? Steve Jobs did respond to the email with a link to Jason Garrett-Glaser, a developer that currently works on an open source h.264 encoder project. And Jason hates WebM so far:

VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Though I am not a lawyer, I simply cannot believe that they will be able to get away with this, especially in today’s overly litigious day and age. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. Until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be extremely cautious.

While Steve Jobs will not take any hits at WebM yet, and he probably won’t at least until we see this standard in action, it’s clear from his response that his not to fond of the idea of giving credit to Google for a product that could end up being used on iPhones, iPod touches, iPads and Macs.

We’ll definitely wait to see how this emerging conflict will shape up the development of WebM. As much as we’d like to see this open Google project take a pleasant shape it looks like this guy working on the h.264 encoder knows what he is talking about and means business. How will you respond to that, Google?