Freedom Blog

The Mozilla Foundation just released native support for the free (as in freedom) audio and video codecs Vorbis and Theora in Firefox. These codecs are possibly the best free codecs existing. Encoding (producing) and decoding (consuming) audio and video files using these codecs is unrestricted by EULAs or license fees for patents.

Currently, the largest archive of free audio and video material is Wikimedia Commons. They will greatly profit from this move. The Wikimedia Foundation applauded to Mozilla’s announcement. They see great potential in free media codecs:

This could never make it into the mainstream without the groups developing and promoting these free codecs — particularly Xiph.org, spreadopenmedia.org, and the FSF’s PlayOGG campaign. The W3C’s policy of only accepting royalty-free technology has played an essential role by not allowing encumbered codecs as part of the standard, but there has been a stalemate in the adoption of a useful, royalty free baseline codec set.

It now seems to be really possible that free codecs make it into the mainstream and become a standard for audio and video content on the web. This is because even the non-free web browser Opera supports these free codecs with a experimental version of their browser. Two major browsers are going to support HTML5’s <audio/> and <video/> tag with free formats. The HTML5 working group at W3C earlier backed down from Nokia’s and Apple’s pressure and rejected Vorbis and Theora in the HTML5 standard. But now there’s the possibility of Ogg and Theora to become the de facto standard. Especially since Microsoft and Apple still have not agreed on a common format. Neither Internet Explorer nor Safari support the new HTML5 media tags at the moment. Thus it will be interesting to see how this turns out and whether freedom will win in the end.

As of today, users with old or non-official ICQ Clients are no longer able to log into the ICQ Network. They received no prior notice and just get the message that their client is too old. The reason for this is still not known, but it has been speculated that it is due to ICQ wanting all users “upgrade” to the new ICQ6 Client. Many users reported the problem in the official ICQ support forum and the first fixes for the problem already appeared in the net.

This incident clearly shows once more that we should not surrender our freedom to communicate to a single power. We should not trust and rely on a proprietary network such as ICQ, AIM or MSN because all our communication can be monitored and restricted by them. If we use such a service, they are able to effectively control a part of our daily communication. That is why everybody should consider switching to the decentral and open Jabber (XMPP) chat network. It’s the community, not some greedy corporation that is in control of this chat service. Everybody can host and control his own Jabber server or choose one that he considers trustworthy. Creating a Jabber account is very easy and there are several free clients out there. Go and get Jabber now!