Oldak Quill wrote:
On 05/01/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan(a)tobias.name>
wrote:
With Wikipedia's large current degree of
popularity, doesn't it have
any influence that could be wielded with manufacturers such as Apple
to encourage them to add Ogg support to their players?
I don't wish to sound conspiratorial, but there are two great
paradigms in computing at the moment: free/libre/open and
proprietary/closed. Wikimedia is ideologically committed to one and
Apple seems to be ideologically committed to the other.
No, Apple is ideologically committed to maintaining a healthy balance
sheet in a market dominated by a ruthless predator. I worked there for
nearly seven years, entirely on the free software that is an integral
part of Mac OS X (I only left to go to Mozilla), as part of a sizeable
team all working on free software. OS X is a descendant of the NeXT
system, for which Jobs adopted free software in the 1980s, long before
most people had even heard of the concept. So it's reallya
misrepresentation to characterize Apple as ideologically proprietary.
On music players, the high-order bit is the deal with record companies
that allows for music to be sold online in vast quantities; Apple isn't
going to jeopardize that just to placate the 43 techies who really want
ogg support. For instance, an ogg implementation that was able to defeat
the DRM would trash Apple's entire music business. I don't have any
inside knowledge though, so for all we know they may announce ogg
support at Macworld in a couple weeks.
Stan