Re: Can't take it.
posted by rick on October 1st, 2004 at 11:48AM

mp3 is not an open format.. http://www.mp3licensing.com/ http://www.mp3licensing.com/

eg. Apple has to pay royalties for every iPod it sells because it plays mp3s... so yes if a linux distro bundles a media player that plays back mp3s, they are supporting a proprietary format.

You're right, MP3 is not an open format. But it still doesn't compare to Windows Media or Real Media or Quicktime. MP3 is part of the MPEG standard; there are royalty fees because the group that developed it - Fraunhofer Institute - decided to charge for it. Fraunhofer has no interest in MP3 other than getting money back from its research. Microsoft, on the other hand, wants everyone to switch to its Windows Media format, as does Real and Apple with their respective formats.

It doesn't only support windows media.. it supports most standard formats.

I know it plays other formats. I never said it only plays Windows Media. I only brought it up to differentiate it from other bundled apps in Windows because it /can/ play a proprietary format. Therefore its inclusion would promote the format to everyone who uses Windows. However, this point has already been diminished by the argument that there's nothing stopping the user from installing the other players.

MS is getting shafted because every extra app or feature they add to Windows has the potential of carrying a $500 million fine

I didn't read the full text of the lawsuit, but I'm going to venture a guess as to how the lawsuit came about. Microsoft sees the success of MP3 and digital music and sees a lucrative market in digital rights management. So it develops the Windows Media format and now it wants to promote it so people use it instead of Real or Quicktime. So they include WMP in Windows that is installed on most consumer desktops today. Real sees this as unfair competition because Real doesn't have a popular consumer OS to bundle its software. Hence the lawsuit.

Actually it's kind of ironic because I remember the earliest versions of WMP included support for RealAudio ...

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