Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
As a thought experiment, imagine a nightmare scenario
where someone is
granted a patent on html, and for a period of time that patent is
vigourously enforced against free software, rendering it virtually
impossible to use the web at all without using non-free or semi-free
software. Would we just shut down? No, we would make the pragmatic
decision to move forward with reluctance.
In that case, I suppose one could still realistically offer two
alternatives (HTML for the Windows users and a new alternative that
would no doubt emerge in the free-software community for the
free-software users). In the case of media files, it would be wasteful
to offer all of them in several or even two formats.
My sense of it is that the inconvenience is minor.
The point about
libraryies and schools is well-taken, but I don't know (none of us do)
how many people would actually be frustrated by that. The question
about what is required of end users is also a valid one, but it seems
like nothing to me to download a plug-in... most people do that sort
of thing all the time.
I completely agree with all of that. For the longest time I was opposed
to OGG, thinking "We already have MP3, and I can play it with my Winamp,
I don't wanna switch!" but then I found out that all I needed was a
little plug-in, and it was trivial to install too.
I think the situation is worse than that. I think it
is not possible
for legal free software to even play mp3s. Am I wrong about that?
According to
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/openletter.html, it was
legal up until recently, because the owners of the MP3 patent officially
allowed royalty-free use of the decoding technology. They have now
revoked this permission and are collecting royalties.
I have Audacity (
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) installed on my
computer, and it can read but not save MP3 files. I downloaded this at a
time when royalty-free implementation of MP3 decoders was still allowed.
Maybe someone should check if the newest version can still do that or if
the functionality has been removed; I don't want to risk losing this
functionality by installing the newest version myself.
Timwi