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With Google finally winning approval to acquire video technology company On2 from the company’s shareholders last week, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) on Friday published an open letter to Google asking it to free the Web from Flash and H.264 video.The FSF supports software that is free of licensing restrictions and is open source. Because both Flash and H.264 are proprietary technologies, the FSF wants to see an alternative video encoding technology become the Web standard. Google now controls just such a technology, On2′s VP8 codec.

“With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world’s largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec VP8,” the FSF says in its letter to Google. “Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube?

You can end the Web’s dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash).

“Google has taken a step in that direction by adding HTML5 video as an alternative to Flash video on YouTube.

But Google’s HTML5 implementation relies on the H.264 video codec, so it’s not really any better from an open source perspective. It’s this reason that Mozilla’s implementation of HTML5 in Firefox 3.6 can’t play YouTube video.

Though Mozilla’s position on proprietary video would seem to preclude supporting Flash too, the company gets around this by relying on a plug-in to render Flash video in Firefox.The FSF wants Google to stream video using VP8 on YouTube and to offer users with obsolete browsers a plug-in or a new browser that supports video using that format. It also notes that Apple has opposed Flash for the wrong reasons and asks Google to do the right thing.

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