Stallman starts a campaign promoting Ogg Theora

Today reading Robin Good I happened to know that Richard Stallman asked him to remove from YouTube his video clips showing Richard’s interview, because

[..] it doesn’t work with free software!

Robin Good is an independent reporter trying to spread Stallman’s ideas:

While I am fundamentally a supporter of Richard Stallman’s views on free software and democracy, I am also an indipendent reporter trying to spread and divulge his ideas, concepts, plans which nonetheless his huge popularity are still completely unknown to the greater part of my readers.

But who knows Stallman knows how important is popularity to him:

The goal of GNU was to give users freedom, not just to be popular.

Despite Richard often forgets that GNU popularity wasn’t supposed to be a goal, he always made clear that the ultimate goal is users’ freedom.
Preventing people from knowing about him and FSF, is a means toward that goal?

The Ogg Theora “standard”. Ogg Theora is an open format supported by an application released under a BSD-style license, but so far there is no format’s specification other than the source code of the program.

No wonder the format has not been approved by any standardization body yet.

Open standards may impose “reasonable and non-discriminatory” royalty fees and/or other licensing terms on implementers of the standard and are harmful for OSS implementations.

Besides licensing issues there are other important issues within standardization bodies policies, like the ten rights reported in Krechmer’s paper “The meaning of Open Standard”.

Standardization bodies should be able to decline to certify subset implementations, or to place requirements upon extensions, as suggested by Perens in his Open Standards and practice, in order to avoid predatory practices.

Richard, Freedom is about knowledge, and file format specifications matters!

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