Blu-ray quality with free formats

[Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild]

On 07/01/14 22:08, Timo Juhani Lindfors wrote:
> Torsten Grote <Torsten.Grote at fsfe.org> writes:
> At least point 4 is quite difficult to assess. Does ogg vorbis meet it
> for example? I have no idea if xiph.org foundation meets "developed
> independently of any single vendor in a process open to the equal
> participation of competitors and third parties;".

As (to the extent of my knowledge) The Xiph.Org Foundation is selling
neither support nor software that implements Vorbis decoder/encoder, the
Xiph.Org Foundation is not a vendor of Vorbis by definition. It is also
unlikely that they are secretly collaborating with a single vendor to
dictate the format.

Regarding the openness of the process… If I am not mistaken, the
specification is/has been produced from the reference implementation's
code base. The reference implementation itself is Free Software and its
development is open to collaboration.

So in all likelihood, Vorbis conforms to point 4. Furthermore, Vorbis is
considered an open standard by the Free Software community.

> Also could a compelete but non-free implementation fullfill point 5?

Possibly. However, proprietary software sometimes grants its users
freedom 0 (the freedom to run for any purpose), but is that relevant to
Free Software in any way? No, because an Open Standard should conform to
all five points in the definition as Free Software must conform to all
four freedoms.


Sincerely,
-- 
Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild
FSFE Fellowship Representative
mailto:repentinus at fsfe.org
xmpp:repentinus at jabber.fsfe.org
http://blogs.fsfe.org/repentinus/