Notes and Jottings

Real opens source but keeps its crown jewels

Real are going to open the base for their multimedia system today. There are a number of options created with this. Small devices are one obvious area where Real would like their formats to become ubiquitous.
The licensing terms are not very onerous, and the patent grants are reasonable from what I can see. In comparison with Quicktime and Windows Media, this is incredibly open, and is worthwhile looking at. I do hope that the patent grants are not revocable, that would be a stumbling block.
There is always Ogg Vorbis, of course. But in the commercial world it has not been gaining much traction so far. There is no reason to ignore Ogg - there is plenty of room for both systems. And many people will not consider the Real option to be free enough - it has its place. Could it become a leading contender in the general world? I don’t think so - not so much from technical as from sociological issues. As usual

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 29th, 2002 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.