As featured on Monty Python's The Meaning of Life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk

By the way, how nice of them to put so many of their clips on YouTube, instead of DMCAing every fan and waiting for the royalties from the dvds...

she = "not authorized to speak publicly on the matter"

said = "confirmed under condition of anonymity".

Like in... that's what she said!

Not now, but what if the rumored Google Music store started to sell ogg files? It would take very little for most of the hardware makers to support it. I know it's day-dreaming, but it is not unreasonable ;)

Have you ever heard of Android? Anyway, the point is that it is "easy" to implement and all it needs is "just" better marketing so the consumers start to demand it. And that would be good for everyone involved, except the holders of the rights to all these other proprietary formats and codecs. That's were a 800lbs gorilla like Google enters the scene to change the consumers' perspective on the issue ;)

Some brands that include the OGG playback feature in their products: SanDisk, Cowon, Trekstor, HTC, Archos, Grundig, iRiver, Philips, Samsung... Pretty neat for a "zero penetration" format ;) BTW, many of them also support FLAC.

1. 1. But being a monopoly is not illegal, while anti-competitive practices sometimes are.
2. 2. A company pushing open source is not only undercutting its rivals, it is also working for them for free. They can embrace open source too... ;)

Google is kind of scary, but it's difficult to deny that they seem to be trying to "not be evil".

Well, that assumption should be made for every accusation. Everybody should be considered innocent until *proven* guilty. Failing to do so gets us to the actual situation where even the suggestion that someone is related to any of that shit can ruin his life.

No, they are forcing you to pay a licence to be able to use a basic infrastructure. And they are preventing any Free alternative OS in the countries were the mpeg-la patents are valid. Maybe someone else will sell you an OS properly licensed (say Red Hat or Canonical), but that won't allow you to share it (i.e. it won't be Free).

Trust me, I'm not one of those floss over-zealots, but they first came for the video tag but I didn't watch any videos online, then...

Come on, it's only trolling if you are wrong! Creating honey pots for people that don't understand the issue to prove their ignorance helps getting them educated ;)

Can you share ffmpeg or x264 binaries in the US without asking mpeg-la for a licence? Remember that your ignorance won't help you from being accountable for your breaking of the law ;) and if you start doing some money from your work and refuse to pay up, you'll be sued to oblivion.

So, can you use x264, ffmpeg or whatever other implementation of the h.264 "open standard" without having to pay any royalties? Can you distribute binaries of that software in countries were software patents are valid?

Thanks. Yes, I was simplifying it on purpose, to prove a point: slashdotters don't really understand the issue. I guess that makes me a troll ;)

Clearly, as I do not understand what are you talking about, could you please point it out? Bear with me, I'm still learning the English language.

Ah, but can't write such a thing and release it under the gpl... And that's my problem with adopting h.264 as the standard. We wouldn't be able to have general-purpose Free OS anymore ;)

So the Right Thing is to force everyone to buy an OS from Microsoft or Apple? Do you know there are some crazy people developing free operating systems? And even using them! How dare they ask for a royalty free baseline codec for encoding video for the web? How selfish they are, giving away their OSes and expecting to be able to play with the Big Boys...