[Xiph-Advocacy] Will Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora and FLAC become free and open standards soon?

[xiphmont at xiph.org]

> The key claim seem to be that Xiph.org is not an international
> standardization organisation, as can be seen from the quote from Lars
> van Marion and the modernisation department in
> <URL: http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece >.  When I
> asked him how he could say what he was quoted in saying, he said he
> was not accurately quoted but repeated that there are (what apparently
> he believe are valid) arguments for claiming Xiph.org were not an
> international standardization organization and refered to the
> Microsoft hearing comment
> <URL: http://www.regjeringen.no/upload/FAD/Vedlegg/Hoeringer/Refkat_V2/MicrosoftNorge.pdf >
> as his source.

We have little interest in the formality of becoming a dedicated
standards body, nor in diverting resources in that direction.  For
this reason, we have preferred to try to work inside existing bodies
such as the W3C and IETF.  This has just recently been seeing some
success.  The current state of affairs is primarily a result of there
existing very few standards bodies committed to
royalty-free/unencumbered standards development.  Within those that
are (such as the IETF), other existing bodies that perform parallel
royalty-bearing work (such as the ITU and MPEG) have lobbied hard to
keep these bodies from taking up competing Free standards work.

In short, if Xiph.Org is not a sufficient practical answer to a search
for free/open codec standards, then no answer currently exists.  The
picture is improving (our new CELT codec is working through the IETF
codec WG now as an input to the 'Opus' standard), but that would be
our first success, and I will point out it is over the strenuous
objections of other royalty-based standards bodies that wanted to
block the work from happening.

There's not much more I can offer on this front.  We're not a member
of the established powers-that-be.  We're their competition.

Monty
Xiph.Org