Recent moves by YouTube and Vimeo to preliminarily embrace HTM5, a technology for publishing video directly onto Web pages, using an open source code, has been generating a lot of excitement, but not from the Mozilla Foundation which manages the Firefox browser.

In a blistering commentary, Mozilla's Director of Evangelism Chris Blizzard claims that the new initiatives from YouTube and Vimeo are not truly "open source" or free for that matter, as they use H.264, a proprietary codec.

The new HTML5 experiments do not work on the Firefox browser.

Last summer, I interviewed Chris about the open source video effort at Mozilla and the implementation of HTML5 on Firefox. 

Interesting analysis of this by Stephen Shankland at CNET.

Andy Plesser, Executive Producer