And MPEG (through MPEG-LA) has long been known to be fairly active in litigating (or facilitating litigation) of the patents they administer.

> It’s hard to call something an “open standard” if anyone who wishes to use it needs to license patents from nokia.

If something needs a licence, it isn't open. I mean, it literally doesn't meet the definition of open.

What's more, if the standard was open, then that would be great, but adopting it so soon and setting it to be the default is woefully shortsighted.

I find it really surreal that this format is named "high efficiency image file format" when it makes no guarantees, no claims, and harbors no aspirations about efficiency. It's an encoding-agnostic container format!