Re: Nokia and Ogg: ambivalence or actively hostile?
 

I think like Jonnycat26 about Nokia reasons.
But btw, I also think we will see ogg support for Nokia in the Internet tablets, though it only is support for ogg vorbis.

Re: Nokia and Ogg: ambivalence or actively hostile?
 

This apply to practically all available today pieces of code. You never know where submarine patent lies. And this is THE argument against software patents.

Re: Nokia and Ogg: ambivalence or actively hostile?
 

If there wasn't Ogg support, I'd never have bought my N800. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Nokia should think about that, seriously. Ogg is, IMO, the replacement for mp3. It's superior in numerous ways, and it's not tied up by the patent police. Every device that plays digital music should support it. There's no good reason not to, although there are several bad ones.

Re: Nokia and Ogg: ambivalence or actively hostile?
 

Maybe that'll explain something.
S**TF**s from Nokia :)
http://www.w3.org/2007/08/video/positions/Nokia.pdf

Re: Nokia and Ogg: ambivalence or actively hostile?
 

Even though i understand JohnnyCat26's explanation, i must agree here. I bought this device and i'm going to develop for it, _because_ it's trying to be Open. I don't care about working for a company for free _if_ it benefits the whole of humanity (ok that may be overblown hehe ;-).

The point is, companies lust for short term profit and selling content is another business than selling devices. You can be good at both but you have to do it without sacrificing any part of each for the other or trying to lock in people. This always backfires (at least i hope it always does).

So nokia, if you make the best tablet to access _ANY_ content, than people will recognize your brand, and then may be interested by your open services for content that are probably going to follow the same design and thus be excellent for the consumer. Ethic still has value, you'll see, FOSS is a new world :-)

That's a strategy i'd lust for... :-)

Re: Nokia and Ogg: ambivalence or actively hostile?
 

I'm baffled by Nokia's position also. It may be as simple as them assuming that since there is so much demand from the community, that the community will fill that void themselves. But with this paper indicating that they think of ogg as proprietary, I am starting to think that someone high in the Nokia decision making tree is very confused since the front-line devs seem (at least morally) supportive of ogg support. I would love to hear their reasoning behind making that premise-less conclusion so I have asked the question on the maemo-dev list ... I don't expect a clear response but I had to try.

/Mike

Re: Nokia and Ogg: ambivalence or actively hostile?
 

Dare I say "what a load of twaddle", we're not locked in in any way. You can use DRM-free mp3 for your music, etc. You can write and run apps on the device, and you can browse whichever sites you want to do download music. I don't know how you can call this "locked in"?

Some people obviously want ogg vorbis support, this is fair enough, I don't know why it's not included, but have given a possible answer. I don't think it's part of a grand Nokia masterplan to make us only buy their music/service/whatever thoughas mp3 offers as many ways to get out of such a masterplan.

Yes indeed, my point was that if Nokia have licensed mp3 (for example) from Fraunhofer IIS, they are probably protected from any "submarine" patents which surface (i.e. Fraunhofer IIS would have to guarantee that they hold all the applicable patents otherwise why bother licensing it at all). On the other hand I don't know if they have licensed mp3 (etc.) from them.

Re: Nokia and Ogg: ambivalence or actively hostile?
 

Well, that is ultimately input from just one guy from Nokia. But I guess the final sentence of that PDF is quite important and revealing, in a non-direct manner:

"All these alternatives are, in our opinion, preferable over the recommendation of the
Ogg technologies, based almost exclusively on the current perception of them being
free."

Re: Nokia and Ogg: ambivalence or actively hostile?
 

Twaddle? Dare I say, you just don't know Nokia.

No, the situation on with the IT side of the company isn't that dire. But look at what they've done with S60. "Symbian Signed" has severely curtailed the development of freeware S60 software, and for a while (months at least, dunno if they've ever fixed it) you couldn't get a free application signed. And no, Nokia, self-signing is not the answer.

One doesn't have to be Nostradamus, or even Criswell, to put Nokia's strategy together. Yeah, you can use non-DRMed music... but they obviously want a piece of the iTunes/online market pie, and who can blame them. Support for MP3 is a must, support for OGG isn't. When it comes to priorities, supporting their DRM'ed online store is going to take precedence over any OGG initiative. We've got an official Rhapsody client for the ITs, but no official OGG support.

Nokia sees a future in services, plain and simple.

Re: Nokia and Ogg: ambivalence or actively hostile?
 

I have no problem with any decision regarding what Nokia will include/support, but:

a. they should make sure that they don't withhold information (ie: OS API's, device driver info, hardware info) from 3rd party and open source developers
b. don't actively put anything in their code to preclude others writing support for non-supported code/filetypes/etc, or do anything to degrade performance of others programs