On 4 Jan 2007 at 16:19, Matt R matt_crypto@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
I'd like to download Spoken Wikipedia articles to my MP3 player so I can learn stuff without being stuck at a computer. At present I cannot, because my MP3 player doesn't play Ogg Vorbis, and cannot be made to support it. Further, MP3's are not permitted on Wikipedia because of the lack of legal free players:
With Wikipedia's large current degree of popularity, doesn't it have any influence that could be wielded with manufacturers such as Apple to encourage them to add Ogg support to their players?
On 05/01/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
With Wikipedia's large current degree of popularity, doesn't it have any influence that could be wielded with manufacturers such as Apple to encourage them to add Ogg support to their players?
I don't wish to sound conspiratorial, but there are two great paradigms in computing at the moment: free/libre/open and proprietary/closed. Wikimedia is ideologically committed to one and Apple seems to be ideologically committed to the other.
I think supporting an open format such a Ogg will be seen as a concession by Apple to FLO and will be avoided for a while. By supporting Ogg, one aspect of the free/libre movement could quickly become ubiquitous. This may be seen as a slippery slope.
Anyway, even if I'm wrong, Ogg Vorbis (and Wikipedia's support of Ogg) is not yet large enough to concede to the open movement for.
Oldak Quill wrote:
On 05/01/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
With Wikipedia's large current degree of popularity, doesn't it have any influence that could be wielded with manufacturers such as Apple to encourage them to add Ogg support to their players?
I don't wish to sound conspiratorial, but there are two great paradigms in computing at the moment: free/libre/open and proprietary/closed. Wikimedia is ideologically committed to one and Apple seems to be ideologically committed to the other.
No, Apple is ideologically committed to maintaining a healthy balance sheet in a market dominated by a ruthless predator. I worked there for nearly seven years, entirely on the free software that is an integral part of Mac OS X (I only left to go to Mozilla), as part of a sizeable team all working on free software. OS X is a descendant of the NeXT system, for which Jobs adopted free software in the 1980s, long before most people had even heard of the concept. So it's reallya misrepresentation to characterize Apple as ideologically proprietary.
On music players, the high-order bit is the deal with record companies that allows for music to be sold online in vast quantities; Apple isn't going to jeopardize that just to placate the 43 techies who really want ogg support. For instance, an ogg implementation that was able to defeat the DRM would trash Apple's entire music business. I don't have any inside knowledge though, so for all we know they may announce ogg support at Macworld in a couple weeks.
Stan