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

Speex Goes 1.0...

[paulcammish]

Speex Goes 1.0, Xiph Goes 501(c)3...

.... I go: "wha?"

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

[pe1rxq]

Speex is a voice codec used for low bandwidth voice data (ie voip).
Ogg is a container format, you can put speex data inside an ogg file.

You probably mean Vorbis, which is an general purpose audio codec much like mp3. Most of the time vorbis data is also put into ogg files.

Jeroen

Re:This is good

[popeyethesailor]

Isnt that what Speakfreely is about ?
Also available for Unix.
CLI based, but some front-ends are available too.

Re:This is good

[IcePic]

Do *NOT* make the same mistake that H323 and SIP has
done and make a protocol that can handle NAT.
With the shortage of ipv4 addresses (or the silly
admins that NAT anyhow) today, you can't use any simple
net-audio no more. People seem to be able to do
most anything, including GameVoice and stuff, but
all the standardised, "serious" software is designed
by people on univerisities or other places that never
heard of NAT so they constantly design the protocols
to send your ip inside the protocol.

Of course, some 2-bit hack kernel module for
ip--filtering for linux appears
in 6 months, but everyone doesn't want to modify
kernels with random modules and unproven code just
because netaudio folks seems to think NAT doesn't
exist.

I'd love for NAT to go away and die, but unfortunately
it wont, so please, if you make an audio app, make
it able to survive a simple port forwarding so I
can 'call' through my $100 cheap-o-matic SOHO-firewall
box.

Sourceforge next?

[dnoyeb]

I have always wondered if I could write off the time I spend on OSS projects as charitable donations. I'm not getting paid for it and it does contribute to the global society. I wonder if sourceforge could not become a charitable organization? At least the software side, the adverts could be a different company that pays the charitable org.

Re:hmmm

[arvindn]

From your fake username, url and sig, I assume you are trolling. However, might as well clear up a point.

From the speex website:

Position regarding patents

The goal of Speex is to provide a codec that is open-source (released under the LGPL) and that can be used in open-source software. This implies that it also has to be free from patent restrictions. Unfortunately, the field of speech coding known to be a real patent minefield and to make the matter worse, each country has its own patent laws and list of granted patents so tracking them all would be next to impossible. This is why we cannot provide an absolute warranty that Speex is indeed completely patent-free.

That being said, we are doing our best to keep away from known patents and we do not patent the algorithms we use. That's about all we can do about it. If you are aware of a patent issue with Speex, please let us know.

Normally there shouldn't be any problem when you use Speex. However for the reasons explained above, if you are thinking about using Speex commercially, we strongly suggest that you have a closer look at patent issues with respect to your country. Note that this is not specific to Speex, since many "standardized" codecs have an unclear patent status (like MP3, GSM and probably others), not to mention the risks of a previously unknown patent holder claiming rights on a standardized codec long after standardization (GIF, JPEG).

Strangely I got a 404 on their website, but got the above info through the google cache.