[Consortium] Re: Xiph and Linuxaudio.org

[Daniel James]

> Monty, Ralph, and I all discussed this and decided we'd like to
> join the organization. :)

Great! I'll add Xiph to the members' page.

> Our only concern about linuxaudio.org is the wording of policy #5:
>
>   The Linuxaudio.org consortium supports open standards and file
>   formats. However, it recognises that reverse engineering of
>   proprietary formats is sometimes required to enable
> interoperability.

> I think it's important for the Free Software movement's future that
> we place strong emphasis on getting support for royalty-free open
> standards _by default_, and only then concern ourselves with the
> rest. 

I'd agree - I think the use of the word 'sometimes' here was intended 
to indicate that. The only reason that proprietary formats were 
mentioned at all was that some developers wanted protection for 
reverse engineering, following cases like Sklyarov. In practice, this 
protection has been hard to get a consensus for among commercial 
companies.

> I suppose we should coordinate some kind of joint press
> release or announcement once the red tape is over.

Sounds good to me!

Cheers

Daniel James
Director
http://linuxaudio.org