Tim Starling wrote:
Some people in the community take the view that supporting proprietary standards, as an option alongside free standards, weakens the ability of the free standards to compete for mindshare and client support, and thus that it shouldn't be done. We would have to have that discussion, and possibly a vote on the issue, before deployment of any software solution. But the software should come first, at the very least it will be useful to support alternate free formats such as Dirac, Speex and FLAC.
I don't know who "Some people in the community" are, but just in case they are anything like myself, who does hold a view not entirely distant from the one you describe...
The one thing I would say is that gettin unencumbered material that was only encumbered by the encoding it was being carried by to formats that are free, is a net plus, no matter if it meant we were also carrying the encumbered format version.
Yours in deep amity;
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen