I just read a couple of articles (x264Dev and Phoronix) about the latest open source decoder for the recently open sourced VP8 codec from Google/On2. It turns out that the new ffvp8 decoder library from the FFmpeg developers is already outperforming the libvpx decoder that was released as open source by Google back in May. 

Is this evidence that the open source development philosophy produces superior software compared to proprietary methods? I don't know, but one thing is for sure. The developers working on the FFmpeg project are some serious badasses. This is not the work of some high school nerds hacking in their parent's basements. These guys are pros.

Let's hope that Google's backing of the VP8 codec can give it the momentum to win over the closed H.264 as the chosen video standard for the HTML5 spec.