VP3 followed by Theora
Move to free software
In September, 2001 it was donated to the public as open source, and On2 irrevocably disclaimed all rights to it, granting a royalty-free license grant for any patent claims it might have over the software and any derivatives, allowing anyone to use any VP3-derived codec for any purpose.
In March 2002, On2 altered licensing terms required to download the source code for VP3 to LGPL.Theora
In June 2002 On2 donated VP3 to the Xiph.org Foundation under a BSD-like open source license to make VP3 the basis of a new, free (e.g. patent- and royalty-free) video codec, Theora.The free video codec Theora was forked off from the released codebase of VP3.2 and further developed into an independent codec. On2 declared Theora to be the successor in VP3's lineage.Theora developers declared a freeze on the Theora I bitstream format in June 2004, allowing other companies to start implementing encoders and decoders for the format without worrying about the format changing in incompatible ways. The Theora I Specification was published in September 2004. Any later changes in the specification are minor updates. A first stable release (version 1.0) of the Theora reference implementation (libtheora) was released in November 2008.