Thomson: MP3 Licensing Same As It Ever Was

Thomson Multimedia is downplaying the recently reported change in the licensing of patented MP3 technology as nothing more than a trivial, semantic change. In a NewsForge report today, Robin ("roblimo") Miller quotes a spokesman who denies that any change in the licensing terms has taken place, "that Thomson laid down its licensing terms long ago, and that if Thomson's terms are not compatible with the GPL today, then they never were." The patent encumbrance of MP3 codecs has worried Free software enthusiasts for a long time; if the recent wording change represents no change in policy, it seems that they really have been right all along. (NewsForge, like Slashdot, is part of the sinister OSDN keiretsu.)

Comments

Re:I'd use it in a second.. BUT

[tuffy]

Despite MY renaming of those files, they're still going to be OGGs. To anyone who isn't me, they'll be OGGs. If OGG becomes the de facto standard of compressed music, people will be passing around files with a OGG extension. If a conversation comes up discussing OGG files, those particular files will still be OGGs.

But if ogg is the de-facto audio file format, and everyone associates oggs with audio files, then you will be one of the few that cares about the file format being difficult to decipher. In that case, you might as well leave them with the .ogg extension and add its association to your mental database.

Whether ogg takes off or no, you're almost certainly among the minority that has any difficulty with the name or extension - simply because hardly anyone knows or cares about them. But you can't expect the rest of the world to change the extension simply to fit your preferences any more than the JPEG can expect people to rename their .jpg files to .jfif (which would be the proper extension). It's just not going to happen.