WebRTC is a framework that was open sourced

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 on June 1, 2011 that allows web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

s to conduct real-time video chat.

Its inclusion in the World Wide Web Consortium

World Wide Web Consortium

The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web .Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the...

 (W3C) standards is supported by Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

, Mozilla

Mozilla Foundation

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...

 and Opera

Opera Software

Opera Software ASA is a Norwegian software company, primarily known for its Opera family of web browsers with over 220 million users worldwide. Opera Software is also involved in promoting Web standards through participation in the W3C. The company has its headquarters in Oslo, Norway and is...

.

It is licensed under the 3-clause BSD license

BSD licenses

BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses. The original license was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix-like operating system after which it is named....

 and the code is based on products from Global IP Solutions

Global IP Solutions

Global IP Solutions is a United States-based corporation that develops real-time voice and video processing software for IP networks. The company delivers embedded solutions that enable real-time communications capabilities for video and Voice over IP...

 — a company Google acquired in May 2010.
WebRTC uses the iLBC, iSAC, G.711

G.711

G.711 is an ITU-T standard for audio companding. It is primarily used in telephony. The standard was released for usage in 1972. Its formal name is Pulse code modulation of voice frequencies. It is required standard in many technologies, for example in H.320 and H.323 specifications. It can also...

 and G.722

G.722

G.722 is a ITU-T standard 7 kHz wideband speech codec operating at 48, 56 and 64 kbit/s. It was approved by ITU-T in November 1988. Technology of the codec is based on sub-band ADPCM ....

 codecs for audio and VP8

VP8

VP8 is an open video compression format released by Google, originally created by On2 Technologies.After purchasing On2 Technologies in early 2010, Google has provided an irrevocable patent promise for underlying patents for the VP8 format, and released a bitstream format specification under a...

 for video and work is underway to migrate the Google Talk

Google Talk

Google Talk is a freeware voice over Internet protocol client application offered by Google Inc. The first beta version of the program was released on August 24, 2005...

video chat plugin to the WebRTC framework.