Speex Goes 1.0, Xiph Goes 501(c)3

Emmettfish writes "Hey, folks! We've posted an announcement this morning; Speex (the free and open voice compression codec by Jean-Marc Valin) has gone 1.0, and the Xiph.Org Foundation is now officially recognized as a charitable non-profit organization by the IRS. Donate to help us write more Free Software and get a tax break. Thanks!"

Comments

Tax Breaks

[Spunk]

Must donations be in cash to qualify for tax breaks? What about donations of time, or code?

Re:What's the difference between Speex and OGG?

[tomzyk]

Could you elaborate more on this? (I actually thought Ogg and Vorbis were just abbreviated names of the same codec "Ogg Vorbis".)

So, you're saying that Ogg is "a container format" and "Vorbis" and "Speex" are codecs.... To make this easier for me to understand, could you give an example of an equivalent of that. (like, is Microsoft's "doc" format a container, but you can actually save different versions of text documents to that container? or would that just simply be using the sae file extension for different formats?)

I'm curious.

Re:This is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod that up ;)

NAT is a reality now because a lot of people with DSL or Cable broadband connections are using NAT-enabled routers...and these are the very same people most likely to use audio or videoconferencing...or anything else interesting.

Re:Public Software Fund

[jvkjvk]

"You also need to show that nobody will get any private benefit from the publicly-funded works."

How is this possible with GPL'd (and perhaps other OSS licensed) code? I thought that anyone could repackage and sell it. With specifications such as the OGG Vorbis specification, they clearly state that it can be utilized to make commercial applications.

These seem to include private benefits of publicly funded works.

Re:Sourceforge next?

[rtaylor]

No... But you can get paid by the OpenSource project then donate the money back to them. Yes, you'll still be paying taxes -- but to the project, you're simply giving them dirt cheap labour.

Is this really a charity?

[GauteL]

Don't get me wrong, I am an Open Source advocate, but is this really a charity worthy of tax deductions?

Charity for me is something that you don't expect anything in return from, but this is certainly not the case with OSS-charities.

With these OSS-charities you get a product in return, and it might even be something you base your business on.

If you are a consultancy-agency developing systems using Xing-codecs for profit, it would seem strange if giving money to Xing is counted as a charity. Can you actually do this?

Re:Is this really a charity?

[Sloppy]

(It's Xiph, not Xing.)

If you give money to a cancer-cure-research organization, it doesn't suddenly become a non-charity if you happen to have cancer.

When it comes to codecs, we all have cancer and we all want the cure. While you do get something in return for your donation, you are not specifically the entity that gets something; everyone gets something for your donation, including your competitors.

Re:What's the difference between Speex and OGG?

[mivok]

in development is Theora, a video codec which is a reworking of the previously closed VP3 codec by On2.

Whatever happened to (ogg) tarkin?

Re:What sort of speed processor do we need?

[Master_Flash]

Do you know if it is a balanced algorithm? Some algorithms are heavy on the encode or decoding side. Ideally this would be blanaced or tilted to faster decoding, since you only encode your voice once but may decode many others. How does it compare to some of the other encoders as far as speed goes?