[vorbis] mp3pro and the mp3 streaming license

[jaromil]

On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 11:29:14AM -0600, Jack Moffitt wrote:

> > Being the advocate of the devil, as always, I honestly don't know if
> > Vorbis is able to change their current "free and open" statute on any
> > random day.
> > 
> > I'm quite sure you won't but what is my guarantee that one day, with
> > the help of the "excellent team of legal representatives of Vorbis",
> > you'd try to to raise license fees once OGG is mainstream or maybe come with
> > "OGG 2.0" or "OGG PLUS" which do try to recover some developing costs
> > using license fees?
> > 
> > I know, that's the last thing on your mind and against the whole
> > spirit of the project, but I'm just mentioning this as a
> > counter-weight to the claims that Thomson is changing patent license
> > agreements on-the-fly.
> 
> A simple answer to this:
> 
> The code is always there for posterity. It's BSD licensed.
> 
> Since we used non-patented things and published our findings, these
> ideas remain in the public domain where they should be.  While we
> certainly could change teh license on our code, or implement
> incompatible versions using patented technologies, what's the point of
> that?  
> 
> In any case, the current Ogg Vorbis intellectual property is
> significantly safe from corruption.
> 
> Other implementations of the spec will further insure this.

and that's the point of ogg-vorbis, icecast and the freesoftware around.

the fact that it is cheaper than other proprietary software is _not_ the
point in promoting, using and aiding development of free technologies.
the choice is _political_ : as it was with gutenberg, 5 centuries ago,
now comes another possibility of horizontalizing the distribution of
knowledge and avoiding it's decay in other proprietary scenarios.

a basic rule in knowledge management science - a pretty well known
analisys, even that descending from a capitalistical approach - is that
whenever knowledge is not made largely available there's going to be a
economical loss on the long term run. let me say that's just the symptom
of a broken system coming to the end which is slowly realizing his main
limit.

therefore i'm not interested in supermarket-like smalltalk about this or
that price: something else is being worked out here and if the focus is
still on money then we're simply not aware of what it means evolution
and what it costs to contribute to it. so to say the story is for sure
not being written by this or that company interest.

at last i believe any argument aimed to defend freesoftware which tries
to navigate into the rotten logic of the actual money based market is
destinated to be turned against the freesoftware itself, revealing
itself as counter-productive.


-- 
jrml ..//korova.dyne.org
6EEE 4FB2 2555 7ACD 8496  AB99 E2A2 93B4 6C62 4800

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.