Stephen Fry - recently self-outed techie - has posted a rather excellent bit of text on world-wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee this weekend. Erm, I think this used to be called his "Guardian column" or something like that ;-) But anyway, whether you read it in the Guardian or on his blog, it's well worth reading if you're not familiar with this rather inspirational pioneer.

I did find it rather funny though that Fry points out that the omnipresent acronym for World Wide Web, WWW, is significantly (3 times) more syllables than its expansion. Perhaps this is one of the first acronyms designed purely for ease of use on computers (especially since it's the same key three times), rather than to save time in speech...

So, I'm an advocate of Free Software, that much is known. But if I were to make a real shift in my usage of software and effectively stop using proprietry stuff, would I have to make sacrifices too?

One immediate thing which with just a little experience of using a system such as GNU/Linux anyone must realise is that multimedia stuff can be a bit of a pain. Many newbies attribute this to Linux's bad support for multimedia. "Linux just isn't as up to date as Windows for playing MP3's and DVD's" they say. Linux is apparently "not ready for the desktop", to quote an oft-used phrase.

Well this week, I decided to do a little delving to find out exactly why MP3's and the like are often not supported on Linux out-of-the-box and surprise surprise, it's nothing to do with technology, but licencing and proprietry restrictions.

The MP3 codec is a fancy bit of maths that basically compresses digital information. It is structured so as to be particularly suitable for audio signals. Part of this maths is patented. Actually, a fair amount of it is, and there are a number of companies which collectively issue licences.

My first reaction to this information was to wonder how this was enforcable, since (in the EU at least) software as such is not patentable. Always remember the "as such"! This doesn't stop the European Patent Office from issuing patents for software however, and quite a few have been. Apparently, the patentability only comes into question if the patent is challenged.

To make things slightly more complicated, the technology isn't licenced to end-users, only companies who make money out of it. This means that you don't have to hold a licence to encode or decode your own MP3's, but if you use software that you bought to do it for you, then the software company probably did. In fact, free (gratis, as in beer) code to encode and decode MP3's is provided by the patent holders, under the condition that it's only used for personal non-commercial activity.

In a world where everything is as black and white as some of these companies would like it to be, where companies produce things and consumers consume them, this model works perfectly. People can have MP3 libraries of their music (depending on the fair use law where they live) and companies can licence the technology to sell to consumers.

However, the world isn't quite like that, and Free Software is a case in point. FFMpeg, for example is an MP3 library released under the Lesser GNU Public Licence. It's important to understand the difference between patents and copyright in a case like this. The patent holders licence the MP3 technology from the patent they hold for use in systems, but it's perfectly possible to come up with a novel way of implementing the technology. This is what FFMpeg does and therefore their novel code can be licenced under the LGPL. Does FFMPeg breach the terms of the patent? Well, so long as we only use it for personal, non-commercial activities, then that's fine.

But, the LGPL requires that the software licenced under it must be able to be used for any purpose. So can I get FFMpeg and use it for my commercial activity? The LGPL says I can, and that's how I received the technology. This may, in fact be what is happening to SanDisk at the moment. Their stall at a trade fair in Germany was raided last week and all their MP3 players taken away following a court ruling in Italy.

I don't want to get too deep into the legal details here (mainly because I am not a lawyer), but it's easy to see why most Linux distributions don't ship with MP3 technology. MP3 code which is licenced in such a way that permits you to do anything with it, but subject to a patent which doesn't, is what's known as a "grey area".

Who is at fault here then? Is it the patent holder for allowing the stuff to be licenced under the LGPL in the first place, or the developer for releasing it in such a way that it permitted usage forbidden by the patent? Like I say, I'm not a lawyer...

So, the next relevant question is, if I'm to stick with Free Software wherever possible, do I use MP3? The answer has to be as close to no as possible, since the patent places severe restrictions on the technology's usage, which are not compatible with GNU licences. However, practically speaking this does mean that I can't listen to any of my MP3's. I could re-rip the CD's to Ogg/Vorbis files of course (which ahem, I may not be allowed to do in the UK anyway), but that will take a lot of time. Also, DVD's are very often encoded using MPEG codecs, so can I not watch them? (Don't even get me started on the CSS debate)

At this point, I really want to scream, since I don't have the time to research exactly under which conditions I am allowed to use various MPEG standard codecs, let alone even find out who owns them. Is it really this hard in a world where you don't rely on Microsoft or Apple to manage your computer for you? It shouldn't be...

So, for want of a decision and nice article summary, all I can end with is a plea for the wider adoption of open file formats. We're making some progress with office applications, let's give Ogg/Vorbis/Theora a boost too.