5 May
2004
5 May
'04
4:37 p.m.
>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel James
<daniel(a)linuxaudio.org> writes:
> 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.
I'm *so* happy about this. The Xiph Foundation participation inside
the (prospective?) Linux Audio Consortium was a very important point
for the AGNULA project, and I'd like to say a big "thank you" to
everybody that made this happen.
> 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 was one of the strongest supporters of this kind of protection, and
I can confirm that the original idea was really to support free
formats and, only if necessary, give people the necessary protection
to reverse engineer proprietary formats.
Shall we reword point #5 as:
The Linuxaudio.org consortium supports open standards and file
formats. Moreover, it recognises that reverse engineering of
proprietary formats is often required to enable interoperability and
supports this kind of activity.
?
bye,
--
Andrea Glorioso andrea.glorioso(a)agnula.org
AGNULA Technical Manager http://www.agnula.org/
M: +39 333 820 5723 F: +39 (0)51 930 31 133
"Libre Audio, Libre Video, Libre Software: AGNULA"