Slashdot linked this weekend to a Nokia position paper on the use of Ogg in the HTML5 proposal for the media elements. For those of us who have followed the HTML5 discussion for some time there is little new in the position paper, he is simply regurgitating the same arguments that Apple Safari people came up with.

HTML5 spec is expected to introduce new audio and video capabilities into the HTML language. However, it seems that Nokia and Apple have succeeded in removing Ogg Vorbis and Theora support from the current draft which decision has caused lots of heated political discussion. Some critics claim that the decision is mostly based on reluctance to back a standard that has no provision for including DRM, while others have mentioned potential patent uncertainties as the main reason not to back Ogg Vorbis and Theora.

I recently read the discussion on the GCC development mailing list related to GCC's transition to GPLv3. Despite generating 172 emails, the transition was quite smooth actually.

Slashdot founder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda recently announced a new Slashdot section dedicated to offtopic humor, memes, viral videos, and pictures. --It's at Idle.slashdot.org. He said it's been beta tested for the last few months but I've only heard about it today.

LINUS CALLS GPLv3 "A FINE CHOICE" - is a title that InformationWeek could have used for their article. It would have been very selective quoting, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for InformationWeek.
Nor does pretending that old emails are new emails, or misrepresenting people.

This is an article I wrote almost two years ago on what I predicted as the inevitable future of MS Windows. With recent events ( http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/29/1425250 ) I see this approaching so I thought this might be an interesting read.

"...'Ogg' is a wrapper that ties together 'Theora' encoded video and 'Vorbis' encoded sound. Together, Ogg Theora+Vorbis give users a way to see movies on your computer. Ogg Vorbis+Theora are not known to be encumbered by any patents (the only applicable patent on Theora’s predecessor, called 'VP3', was licensed for everyone to use in any way they want).

"...While supporting HTML5 would be nice, the fact that MSIE7 won’t allow CSS rules to apply to any of the new HTML5 elements will significantly inhibit adoption of this standard."

It seems Apple is not the entity fighting for a DRM-less world we thought they were and Nokia isn’t such a great patron for open source software either. For those who haven’t heard the news, lobbying by both companies have caused the W3C to strike a provision in a HTML5 draft which would make OGG Vorbis and Theora a standard media format on the web.