There is a conflict of interest when the camera company is given 50% of of the fine. It would be like paying a bonus to cops based on the number of tickets that they write.

Europe isn't a country either...

What do you mean it doesn't behave very well?

This seemingly benevolent entrant into web video just might actually dethrone some other piss poor examples of vendor lock-in. That said, I welcome the contender as this may also mean substantial growth in their authoring tools and standardized quality content.

The success of this codec on the web is determined by how widely it's adopted by various disparate authoring platforms. It is likely that adoption is dependent on corporate collusion as much as it is consensus. And that as a result, a competing more robust codec will bite the dust, while it's dumbed-down stripped-down alternative claims wild success and dubs themselves "lord" for revolutionizing the web. Understand though, developer adoption is strictly responsible for a codec's success. Corporate agenda's simply manipulate developers and therein indirectly effect Google's profit margins.

However, a properly informed and pragmatic developer will generally use the best tool for the job. Sometimes the goal is shaky, but draconian time-constraints, bad management, and good marketing will perpetuate horrendously unmaintainable software's popularity. This trend and the resulting chaos are what causes corporations to participate in vendor lock-in and artificially inflate their products price-point. Their shit stinks, they know it, and in order to maintain corporate relevancy, they lie.

There is little consensus now because developers want robust and free, as they should. You can't get it until Google says "screw you guys" and gives away a codec, basically saying to current codec proprietors to get their heads out of their asses and evolve, otherwise face extinction.

It saves energy if you do it right. Taking an off the shelf PFC corrected server power supply and giving it 140-280 volts dc rather than 120/240 volts ac may raise the efficiency 1-2%, better yet, remove the diode bridge for another 1.1 or .6% improvement. Additionally, removing the PFC input stage reduces the cost of said supply by 15-30%, and feeding it 300-350 Vdc directly will increase the efficiency 4-8% Converting your utility provided 480/277VAC line into 270Vdc outside the building with just passive cooling saves a lot of heat, if by a lot of heat you mean 5-10% Downsides? 200-400 Vdc outlets are expensive. You have to figure out what is the optimal voltage to feed your servers. You may find that a 270 volt supply with the combined surge suppression of 100,000 servers costs more than 10% of your energy bill per year.

The MS-DOS mouse driver works in tons and tons of applications from that period. And even today. I still use an elderly version of Ghost to back up systems and create bootable 'restore' CD's. The boot image is a DOS variant and loads the Microsoft Mouse driver to run the Ghost client.

Maybe 15 or fewer years they will when all applicable patents expire. God bless the patent system.