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Theora (Ogg Video) Reaches First Milestone

Posted by timothy on from the two-to-go dept.

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."

1 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. Licences by Trusty+Penfold · · Score: 4, Interesting


    It is unwise to release beta and RC builds under an open licence. 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. Not through maliciousness, but because of the tendency for people to tinker with the source and not pass the fixes back to the original source.

    Beta software should be released under a restrictive license. People cannot distribute modified copies. Nor should people be allowed to distribute anything other than the officially released binaries (if they exist).

    This would force bugfixes back into the main branch, maintained by the original creators, so the final software is as perfect as possible and bugs don't persist for ever in beta-quality forks.