Theora (Ogg Video) Reaches First Milestone

strmcrw writes "Today Theora (maintained by the Xiph.org Foundation) releases their first of three planned Milestones. Theora will be a video codec that builds upon On2's VP3 codec and is going to be integrated in the Ogg multimedia container. The code is under a BSD style license, for the legal terms on the usage of the VP3 codec, please check out their CVS page."

Comments

The benefits of freedom go both ways.

[jbn-o]

As has been seen with many other projects, the code gets branched at that point and progress towards and stable and bug-free final release is hindered.

Forking the project does not in itself hinder one fork from proceeding. The trouble with non-copylefted Free Software licenses are popular proprietary derivatives because then you are competing with what is partially your own work. If the proprietary improvements are patented as well you'll find it much more difficult to write a compatible substitute. As I understand it, the Ogg Theora team's choice of license is strategic.

Beta software should be released under a restrictive license. [...] This would force bugfixes back into the main branch [...]

I disagree. I don't think the freedoms of Free Software disappear or become unimportant just because the software is a pre-release. You cannot force people to help you with your software. You might not get the help you want unless you show you're willing to let them share what you've done.