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Software patents and encumbered formats

Posted Mar 14, 2008 22:20 UTC (Fri) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141)
In reply to: Software patents and encumbered formats by epa
Parent article: Nokia on its relationship with the open source community

Ogg is a container format, not a video or audio codec. It can contain payload data encoded in
a multitude of video and audio formats, which may or may not be covered by software patents.
When you call Ogg a "free format", you are confusing this distinction and your argument
becomes invalid.

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Posted Mar 15, 2008 0:23 UTC (Sat) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

Oh... I was going to say Ogg Vorbis, but I thought that Vorbis referred to a particular
program implementing the encoding and decoding, and not to the spec of the audio file itself.
What is the technically correct way to refer to the most popular Ogg audio format?

Software patents and encumbered formats

Posted Mar 15, 2008 7:39 UTC (Sat) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link]

Vorbis, not Ogg Vorbis, since Vorbis can be stored in containers other than Ogg and the name
of the audio codec is just plain Vorbis.

Supposedly unencumbered formats

Posted Mar 15, 2008 8:01 UTC (Sat) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

> What is the technically correct way to refer to the most popular Ogg audio format?

Ogg Vorbis.