Thread: Nokia and Ogg: ambivalence or actively hostile?
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Benson is offline Benson
2007-12-11 , 15:14
Posts: 4,930 | Thanked: 2,272 times | Joined on Oct 2007
#30
Originally Posted by linuxrebel View Post
The W3C is a lot more than a <blink> tag committe, If you had botherd to ever read any of the html standards versions, you would know that, that tag, was a creation of netscrape/IE and never a part of html, and rejected when submitted.
I don't think that bit of Rocketman's comment was intended quite seriously; at least I truly hope not.
As for the position paper, all papers must be submitted by individuals. When that individual represents a company, it must be stated (as it is) that the paper represents that company or other organizations position. This is done in order to establish a point of contact, and to prevent anonymous papers that might be harmful to a company being filed by a rival concern. (Sun can't file a paper claiming to be coming from IBM)
As I understand Rocketman, his question wasn't whether this is a position of Nokia or merely this individual, but
Whether his views represent Nokia at large or the NIT group in particular
Which still seems to be an open question. In an organization the size of Nokia, it's certain that there will be some differences of opinion between divisions. It could be that this is the "corporate viewpoint", but that there are strong pro-OGG sentiments in the NIT group. Or that this represents the NIT group, but the smartphone people really love OGG. Or maybe they all hate Theora. This probably doesn't matter from W3C's perspective; that it's Nokia's position is probably quite enough for them. But it could have serious impact on what the capabilities of future NITs will be.
Put the mud away we have some real concerns here. Obvously Nokia's Lawyers still don't grok OSS and as yet aren't ready to either use the FSLSC (I hope I have the achronym right.), the legal team for the FSF (Free Software Foundation) or to trust the recent court descisions related to OSS. The education must be done, but not with mud and inuendo.
Maybe, or maybe they simply don't want DRM-free formats standardized. It's hard to score content when the people with the content demand DRM, and you can't use DRM. So by avoiding standardization on a codec/wrapper combination with no DRM implementation, they can avoid being accused of breaking standards later when they are delivering DRMed content. They mentioned this as a reason, and I'm inclined to suppose that it is their main reason, and the extra BS is just a bunch of extra BS thrown in for padding.