[Flac-dev] Should FLAC join Xiph?

[Steve Lhomme]

En réponse à earldunovant at earthlink.net:

> On 21 Nov 2002 at 1:39, Josh Coalson wrote:
> 
> > 2. The core libraries would become BSD-licensed.  I've been really
> > 50/50 on this ever since I submitted the question to Slashdot
> > (see http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/27/1650256 ).
> 
> Interesting thead. I think your issues are with software developers. The
> 
> hardware guys are using the decoder, and they have no incentive to 
> make do something bizarre that would make it incompatible with what 
> the core encoder implementation outputs. But in thinking about the 
> software end, I think back to the ARC vs. ZIP. If a particular 
> implementation becomes very popular, the author would have plenty of 
> incentive to develop extensions to the encoder that might break other 
> people's decoder implementations. 
> 
> Are file extensions copyrightable? If they are, maybe you can copyright
> 
> the extension for FLAC files to insure that anything claiming to be a 
> FLAC file is compatible with the core libraries. Incompatible extentions
> must be called something else.

We actually have the same concern with the MCF format (see http://mcf.sf.net/).
We want to make an open and standard file format for multimedia. And we
definitely would like some hardware support in the future. But being open (the
code as well) make any minor changes possible and so incompatible formats
appearing, and claiming they are MCF.

To avoid that, the only solution we have found so far is to create a
certification program and a logo. Only applications/hardware that pass a few
tests on the standard would be allowed to use the logo.