Why Free standards are better

The reason I prefer Free, open standards is because shit like this can't happen. People expected it to happen with GIF. Compuserve had a patent, Unisys owns Compuserve, pretty much everyone saw that one coming.

This JPEG thing is a different story. I thought that standard was pretty safe. I guess I was wrong. Some people rag on me for using Ogg Vorbis as my primary audio file format, but the reason I do is because if of this: the patent owners for MP3 charge licencing fees to encode, decode, or distribute anything in MP3 format.

I believe that vendors will eventually all include Free format support in their applications because it will cost them nothing except the time to implement it. I believe that users will eventually use Free formats because it will cost them nothing to distribute their works and the applications that create them will cost less because of the absense of licencing fees. But most of all, I believe that the world needs to support Free formats. I mean, why should you get charged for the format in which you distribute your work. It just doesn't make sense to me.

Don't get me wrong; I appreciate all the work that the authors of the MP3 format did to increase the electronic distribution of music, but the opportunity now exists for the masses to put their weight behind a truly open and Free standard. And I'm doing what I can to support it.

Open picture format: PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
Open audio format: Ogg Vorbis
Open video format: Ogg Theora

Originally posted on Monday, 2004-04-26 at 23:31:49.