I guess most have seen the story about how EMI and Apple are going to offer big parts of EMI catalogue in AAC format without any kind of DRM protection. If this pans out well I think it could be the begining of the end for widespread use of DRM.
Christian F.K. Schaller
Blog talking about Fedora, GNOME, GStreamer and related topics. Anything I write in this blog is me speaking as a member of the open source community, official Red Hat communication happens on Redhat.com. The comments are my own personal opinion.
I read that AAC is open standard! and most music players already support it, why FOSS back up OGG and not AAC?
adel: AAC is an open standard in the sense that there is available documentation. However, you require a patent license to distribute AAC decoders.
There are free software AAC decoders, but it is not clear that it is legal to distribute them without a patent license in some regions, so they don’t show up in the default install of most distributions.
In contrast, the OGG codec stack does not have this issue so usually ships by default.
I noticed that even Microsoft is shipping parts of OGG codec stack for the WMP11 on Vista..
Christian, I hope you’re right. I’ve sent Apple several emails in the past asking them to either remove the DRM or provide a native iTunes client for Linux (possibly via a plug-in to existing players, etc), and explaining that I use illegal software to remove the protection from songs I purchase from them. I’m more than happy to pay extra for freedom (and higher quality is nice, too); actually, I usually buy entire albums, so the prices change won’t affect me too much.
Even so, I’m attempting to wean myself off of popular music and use more services like Magnatune, which seems to have a business model that is more fair for the artists and the consumers, though it might not be conducive to the creation of pop divas. ;-)