You're mixing copyright with patent law. Derived work is a copyright term. Patents prohibits you from implementing an idea (in software, possibly only in a certain way).

Another commenter remarked on what might be the issue here. And that is the exact terms of the patent licenses used by MPEG-LA. Being a contract agreement, it might stipulate any terms really. And it seems they are frequently limited not just to specific patents, but also to detailed purposes (i.e. decode or encode H264.1 video streams, broadcast said streams, etc).

So, my bad for not realizing the detailed scope of the patent licensed used here. The situation might indeed be similar to the Oracle case, although those patent licenses are specific in a very different way.

It's the same patents as far as MPEG LA is concerned. Google already licenses these (via YouTube at least), so can't be sued over that it seems. I find it hard to believe that they'd sue over statements Google has made regarding WebM.

Opera and Mozilla on the other hand, have no license. And now distribute WebM codecs. Hence a better target.

The natural party to sue would be Mozilla or Opera here, not Google I think. Google already pay the appropriate license fees for YouTube, so there seems to be very little of a legal case there.

As long as developers keep rewriting apps from scratch every 2-3 years, they'll never become truly stable or usable. And they won't progress much beyond tech demos or the basic feature checklists.

When will we see true progress in integration, usability or features?

Worth noting is that Apple has invested rather heavily in technology to allow programmer use of the GPU in MacOS X. And were recently rumored to have met with high ranking persons from AMD. Seems only logical that this type of chip could find its way into some of the Apple gear.

Question is of course if it would be powerefficient enough for laptops, where space is an issue...

In theory 'nice' or 'renice' would do the right thing. But in most OS:es it seems to only affect the CPU scheduling. The IO scheduling is often left unmodified, meaning that a single IO-bound application may effectively block the harddrive from access by other applications.

These days, the relatively lower memory and IO speeds are often the real performance bottlenecks for ordinary applications. So improved IO scheduling might do more than multiple cores for the perceived performance of a specific system or workload.

Since everyone is always referring to BeOS in these types of discussions, I guess the CPU and IO scheduling must have been one of the things that they got right.