Yesterday (March 25) was again Document Freedom Day, a celebration of open standards. Rather than my usual critical cheering, this year I took to adding all of my pertinent posts to a free/libre/open formats/protocols/standards category and want to highlight two exciting announcements:

(1) IETF NetVC BoF notes, slides:

Goals for the Proposed WG

• Development of a video codec that is:
  • Optimized for real-time communications over the public Internet
  • Competitive with or superior to existing modern codecs
  • Viewed as having IPR licensing terms that allow for wide implementation and deployment
  • Developed under the IPR rules in BCP 78 (RFC 5378) and BCP 79 (RFCs 3979 and 4879)
• Replicate the success of the CODEC WG in producing the Opus audio codec.

For more on why this is exciting, see Opus! and “I would love it if all patents evaporated” (WebRTC). Appropriately, yesterday also brought another blog-like post (discussion) on the development of the Daala codec, which could form the basis of the hoped-for IETF standard.

(2) LibreOffice Online is coming. If successful it will fill a major gap in the free software product line. I worried about this gap the last time I congratulated LibreOffice on another release.