The open source software development model has made substantial inroads into the mainstream consumer and enterprise markets over the past few years – to the point that even Microsoft is now tentatively testing the waters by supporting the Apache Foundation (the folks behind the ubiquitous open source Tomcat web server) and even contributing some code to the underlying kernel of the open source Linux operating system.

Software created by an open community of contributing developers with full access to pre-compiled source code – how secure and stable can it be?   Such long-held concerns have now largely faded, as robust and secure open source applications have flourished over the past few years.

When it comes to online video, though, open source remains a bit of a work in progress.

At the root of any online video technology is the codec  (compression/decompression) software needed to reduce the bandwidth required to transmit content over the internet.  The most popular codecs are licensed by Microsoft and MPEG, but there’s an open source codec out there as well: Theora.  An interesting bit of history: Theora is administered by the non-profit Xiph.Org Foundation, which based the codec on the “VP3″ codec developed and subsequently released to the public by a small company called On2 Technologies way back in 2001.  In the years that followed, a community of developers continued to contribute to the evolution of what became the Theora open source codec while  On2 kept at it, developing new proprietary codecs of their own.  They were up to VP8 when the phone rang one day last month with an offer to be acquired for $106.5 million by a somewhat less small company: Google.

If the deal is approved by On2’s shareholders, it’s rumored that Google intends to release the source code of VP8 as well, although no such plans have been officially released yet.  In any event, it’ll be interesting to compare  Google’s platform (based on On2’s VP8) with OGG-Theora (based 8 years of open source improvements to VP3) – in short, a useful case study of the relative effectiveness of proprietary and open source software development models.

Indeed, Theora has hit some snags recently: once slated to be the standardized codec for the upcoming HTML 5 video tag, several browser manufacturers have questioned whether Theora is quite ready for prime time.  As a result of the impasse over which codec to define within the HTML 5 standard, compliant browsers will now be free to implement their own choice of codec(s) – with the unfortunate result of substantially reducing the intended benefit of standardization promised by HTML 5’s video tag.

And on the mobile front, much has been made of the iPhone’s recent support for streaming over HTML as a nod to open protocols  – but while HTML is in fact ‘open’ (as opposed to Adobe’s dedicated RTMP media protocol), the underlying codec isn’t – Apple has chosen the closed MPEG’s H.264 (and not surprisingly, Microsoft’s Silverlight uses their proprietary VC-1 codec).

All is not lost for the Theora codec, though.  Wikipedia.org has some big plans: later this year the popular open source encyclopedia site plans to launch an innovative video platform that will allow users to upload (and communally edit!) video in much the same way they now upload and edit each others’ text (see below).

So far, only the open source Mozilla Firefox browser has made firm plans to support the Wikipedia/Ogg Theora video natively (Internet Explorer will launch a Java media player to handle the Wikipedia video content). While it’s not surprising that the quintessential open source web browser and the quintessential open source encyclopedia site would both promote an open source video codec, in the greater marketplace Theora still faces formidable competition, though: H.264 and VC-1 are well already established, and now we all await Google’s plans for the On2 acquisition.  

What will ultimately decide the relevance of Ogg Theora is how well it performs – and with 63 million unique visitors per month, the wikipedia.org video platform should be a great proof-of-concept.