Nokia Claims Ogg Format is "Proprietary"

[greggh]

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid= ... 0&from=rss

"Several months ago a workgroup of the W3C decided to include Ogg/Theora+Vorbis as the recommended baseline video codec standard for HTML5, against Apple's aggressive protest. Now, Nokia seems to be seeking a reversal of that decision: they have released a position paper calling Ogg 'proprietary' and citing the importance of DRM support. Nokia has historically responded to questions about Ogg on their internet tablets with strange and inconsistent answers, along with hand waving about their legal department. This latest step is enough to really make you wonder what they are really up to."

From Nokia's position paper...

http://www.w3.org/2007/08/video/positions/Nokia.pdf

Nokia’s recommendation for Codec Choices for normative reference by W3C

Considering our requirements, we believe the widespread use of technically competitive, but not necessarily “free” open standards, such as H.264 for video and AAC for audio, would serve the community best. This would be fully aligned with the business model dominant in the digital video ecosystem.

As a major device manufacturer, we obviously prefer cheaper solutions. Therefore, Nokia has, in the past, supported initiatives in committees such as MPEG towards royalty-free standards (which unfortunately were not fully successful). We are actively considering making more such attempts, and W3C’s considerable evangelization power could be directed towards a similar use. Options for W3C include enhanced liaison activity towards bodies such as MPEG and the ITU-T in order to launch projects closer to W3C’s view on IPR, suggesting tighter company- internal coordination in those companies which contribute to both “ecosystems”, and so on.

Anything beyond that, including a W3C-lead standardization of a “free” codec, or the active endorsement of proprietary technology such as Ogg, ..., by W3C, is, in our opinion, not helpful for the co-existence of the two ecosystems (web and video), and therefore not our choice.

All these alternatives are, in our opinion, preferable over the recommendation of the
Ogg technologies, based almost exclusively on the current perception of them being
free.

Just when you think a company is a FOSS ally they try to knife you from behind when they think you're not looking. I think I'll skip buying a N800 or N810.

[dann]

So we can say it boils down to this:

All these alternatives are, in our opinion, ... based almost exclusively on the current perception of them being free.

Essentially they are saying we support these technologies because of DRM, corporate backing, and the perception that they are free, even though they are not.

Ogg was proprietary technology that was released under the GPL and BSD. It's free for commercial and non-commercial use.

That's the scary thing. There are a lot of people out there (apple is one of them) that are pushing h264 as an open technology. But in actuality, it's patent encumbered. This comes back to what is the definition of open? Nokia states it clearly, it's a perception, in this case.

[Tsuroerusu]

Ogg was proprietary technology that was released under the GPL and BSD.

Wasn't that OGG Theora? I'm fairly sure OGG Vorbis has always been free software.

It's free for commercial and non-commercial use.

* Troels wonders why he still bothers ... *

In case you were referring to using the Vorbis source code inside a proprietary application when you said "commercial", well having software be available for commercial/non-commercial use, essentially means that the Free Software Foundation can sell you a copy of the the Vorbis libraries.

In programmer terms: Commercial != Proprietary

This may sound puristish, but am I wrong? If you go buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux then that distribution of RHEL is commercial software, for the stars' sake you pay 2500 bucks for the thing!!! (Unless you're using CentOS)
If I sell a server with Linux on it, then that's commercial use of Linux.

That's the scary thing. There are a lot of people out there (apple is one of them) that are pushing h264 as an open technology. But in actuality, it's patent encumbered. This comes back to what is the definition of open? Nokia states it clearly, it's a perception, in this case.

But Dann, we should all use ActiveX!! It's a standard!