
Richard Stallman on the Ogg Vorbis license (2001) - _pius
https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3
======
simonsarris
The reasoning in this short message seems very unlike anything else I've heard
from Stallman. Has he changed a lot since 2001? From what I've read I'd gander
that Stallman has become markedly less pragmatic (or more radical?) since this
was written.

Listening to him speak in 2009 was surreal, especially during the Q&A session.
I can't recall any specific quotes but he was ready to burn ten bridges for an
ounce of symbolic freedom. The whole time I kept thinking of this John
McCarthy (coined the term AI, "discovered" lisp) quote:

"He's a man of principle. He'd cut his mother's throat for a principle."

~~~
ajross
Stallman has been viewed as "radical" his whole career. Certainly there was
nothing more "pragmatic" about him in 2001.

The important distinction is that the things (you don't list specifics, so I'm
just assuming) that Stallman finds "important" seem like senseless
distractions to his audience. It's hard to remember now, but in 2001 the idea
of patent-encumbered algorithms being a threat to free software was not nearly
as well-understood as it is now. Most people in the community were happy to
download and build LAME (or whatever), and just shrugged when the Linux
distros turned out not to be able to ship it.

Stallman was right (and to be clear: he'd been screaming about patents for a
decade already in 2001). We were wrong. This has been a pattern his whole
career.

So, again without actual evidence, I'm just going to guess that within a
decade that stuff you heard in 2009 that sounded so "radical" is going to seem
a lot more clear in hindsight.

~~~
angersock
Stallman has two really, really annoying features:

1\. He is a grating and uncompromising lunatic, and does not make any attempts
to present himself as agreeable to other people.

2\. He's been proven completely correct on everything he's warned us of in
this industry to date.

~~~
rimantas
#2 is total bullshit.

~~~
olefoo
[ citation needed ] on both the declaration that he's been proven right and on
your slapdash dismissal of that assertion.

And, please, could you be more of a contributor and less like an aggressive
drunk starting a bar fight?

~~~
cgh
This very story is a potential example. The mp3 patents in the US will expire
in 2015. What "harm" has been done in that time? Fraunhofer made a pile of
dough and that's about it. The open alternatives failed to catch on and my
guess is that after 2015, mp3s will still be used as before. Very few users
will know or care that the patents have expired.

I guess you could say Stallman wasn't wrong exactly, just unnecessarily
alarmist over this particular issue. I'm not saying software patents are
benign, by the way - I'm only addressing mp3 here.

~~~
freehunter
It's easy to look back and say "see, it didn't do any harm!" Predicting the
future is much more difficult, and it's perfectly reasonable to look at past
trends in that prediction. If Frauenhofer had stopped giving out licenses,
would you still be making that argument? If they started patent trolling, what
would you be saying?

Calling someone out after the fact for warning about the potential for harm
when the risk is very real based on what happened in the past just sounds like
revisionism.

~~~
aeturnum
This section of the discussion has entirely been about hindsight, specifically
that RS has always been right.

On one hand, it's possible that mp3 could have become the defacto standard by
being widely available, and then had the patent holders clamp down and raise
prices. This didn't happen, and I don't think it was likely to happen.

RS' writings always have two parts. First, he predicts what could happen if
things keep going in the current direction. He's quite good at this, because
he's a smart guy, and all of his predictions I'm familiar with reflect a
future that I think is _technically possible._ Second, however, is the tone
and gravity he assigns to the consequences and likelihood of those possible
futures. I find those parts of his writing to be unreasonably pessimistic and
actively harmful in avoiding real problems.

------
loumf
It is exactly the FSF's reasoning for LGPL -- to stop a non-free alternative
from becoming a standard:

 _Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every library. There are
reasons that can make it better to use the Lesser GPL in certain cases. The
most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for
proprietary software through other alternative libraries. In that case, the
library cannot give free software any particular advantage, so it is better to
use the Lesser GPL for that library._

<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html>

------
jiggy2011
Why is MP3 still more popular than Ogg if Ogg is much more leniently licensed?

As an end user I can't discern any difference between the two in terms of
filesize or sound quality.

~~~
ajross
The MP3 patents have at this point largely expired, so there's comparatively
little real cost in implementing them for commercial products. And actually,
to the extent that the difference can be measured, Vorbis is generally
considered to be a better codec.

But content rules. I have 8G of mostly-mp3 music in my Google Music account
simply because that's how I got it. Players out there play mp3 because that's
what is out there. Of the successful consumer platforms out there, only
Android includes ogg support out of the box, and that mostly due to the whims
of its developers than any real market pressure.

It's exactly that point that Stallman was talking about in 2001 -- despite
having very good software available, we're now into our second decade of "free
software products cannot play music by default". Maybe we should have listened
to him more carefully...

~~~
Semaphor
Sansa clip (a successful player for those of us who want really small devices
to play music on the go, before it I still had a usb-stick/mp3 player combo)
had ogg out of the box.

------
mellis
The key point here is the difference between copyright and patents. If someone
has a copyright on something, you can create an alternative (free)
implementation of it. If they have a patent, you can't.

------
kunai
This reminds me of a time when I emailed rms about the entire GNU/Linux naming
controversy. I had said that perhaps Linux could officially be the name of the
OS, and also that to solve the problem of GNU and the FSF not receiving
credit, that people could be educated on who actually wrote Linux.

Needless to say, he disagreed. Stallman is as stubborn as a boulder, and a
complete extremist.

But he's also right.

~~~
dllthomas
GNU/Linux is precise in the way alternatives aren't.

Linux kernel running BusyBox? Linux, but no GNU software; not GNU/Linux.

GNU utilities, BSD kernel? GNU but no Linux; not GNU/Linux.

These are things that exist: lots of routers and similar "running Linux" use
BusyBox; Debian will let you install a BSD kernel.

Of course, "I am running Linux on my desktop" is accurate, and carries the
expectation that you're using much of the rest of the GNU system because
that's by far the most reasonable (and common) option... so people say that,
because it's fewer syllables, and the FSF feels like they're not getting the
credit they quite rightly deserve, and that's the situation we're in.

But changing the name of the GNU project to Linux is not a solution at all;
they're still working on Herd for one thing.

------
Finster
Wait a minute. Now that a court has decided mathematical algorithms can't be
patented, can't we have the MP3 patent thrown out?

~~~
duaneb
The MP3 patent isn't a numerical algorithm, it's a description of using a
certain algorithm to store sound (to my understanding). Yes, that seems like a
silly distinction, but that's basically what patent law is.

------
gcb0
ogg/vorbis just have to change the format name. saying ogg (the file
extension) is awkward in any language. hence nobody cares for an ogg player.

just name it FM4 (free music 4). is will just naturally enter the mind of
everyone that hears it as a a natural replacement for MP3.

(dolbly did that, AC3 just to have the 3. mpeg-la did that, MPEG-4 after
mpeg2)

