[Theora] Theora, great stuff!

[illiminable]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "J.B. Nicholson-Owens" <jbn at forestfield.org>
To: <theora at xiph.org>
Sent: Monday, August 22, 2005 12:02 PM
Subject: Re: [Theora] Theora, great stuff!


> Ralph Giles wrote:
>> Doing so would also raise the barrier to entry for people wanting to use 
>> our formats in proprietary applications, both software- and hardware-
>> based. Network effects are extremely important in file format success, 
>> and we have generally felt that licensing our reference implementations
>> under a BSD license to encourage the broadest possible adoption of free
>> formats is a more important goal.
>
> Is there reason to believe that proprietary applications will incorporate 
> a free Theora in their programs?

Sure... why not.

I totally agree with Ralph... the success of a format is as much measured by 
the number of people and applications that use it, as it's technical merits. 
The more people and projects that start using it, the better. A BSD license 
makes it no problem for companies to use in proprietary software.

As for proprietary applications... my directshow filters are BSD, based off 
the BSD work of xiph in theora, vorbis, speex and flac. Yahoo! Music Engine 
is a commercial product, and it uses these filters. It plays theora, and all 
the other ogg formats. I've also used theora in other proprietary 
applications.

The way i see it, we need to make it as easy and painless as possible for 
the more well known applications to support the formats.

Zen.