The Xiph.Org Foundation has announced the release of Theora 1.0. As a patent- and royalty-free video codec, Theora is an excellent choice for artists, producers and developers who want to help make a world in which everyone can safely and easily use free software. Theora has been standardized since 2004 but this mature and stable release is an important milestone.

Upcoming releases of Mozilla Firefox will support Theora natively with the new HTML5 element <video src="file.ogv"></video>, which means that all of the other free software web browsers derived from the Firefox code base, like Iceweasel and GNU IceCat, will be able to do the same.

Congratulations to Xiph.Org on the release! It's great to see it getting easier and easier for people to Play Ogg.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced something they called "Global Anti-Piracy Day".

Software companies like Microsoft often refer to copying they don't approve of as "piracy." They suggest that such copying is ethically equivalent to murder and robbery. Even these far-fetched analogies are not enough for Microsoft, who in their press release yesterday updated the comparison to draw a connection between such copying and organized crime: "There is growing evidence that highly organized, transnational criminal organizations and networks are involved in the counterfeiting of software..."

Even the US Senate, while recently considering legislation addressing unauthorized copying, had the sense to strike the term "piracy" from its text. You know the term is over-the-top when people receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the entertainment industry still feel shy about using it.

But Microsoft has no such shame. These claims about organized crime syndicates are an exaggerated threat designed to garner public and government acceptance of the onerous restrictions that Microsoft places on each and every one of its users. Even if they are correct that criminals copy Windows, this means nothing. Criminals will sell or steal whatever they can to raise money for their activities -- the idea that schoolchildren, for example, should be restricted in ways that severely impair their education and freedom so that criminals will have a harder time copying Windows is laughable.

Microsoft even claims that "anti-piracy" methods like "Windows Genuine Advantage" protect customers and users. Actually, the licenses for Windows software threaten those users with legal action should they attempt to study how the software works, share it with a friend, or make improvements to it on their own. Proprietary software like this is thoroughly anti-user, and is about maximizing control for Microsoft at the expense of security and freedom for users. Don't forget the fact that Windows Genuine Advantage notoriously makes mistakes, crippling even legal copies of Windows by putting them in "Reduced Functionality Mode". The whole arrangement is like the "Software Protection Authority" darkly described in Richard Stallman's "Right to Read".

They are even offering an "anti-piracy hotline" at (800) RU-LEGIT where people can call and report receiving suspicious software. But what's the definition of suspicious software? It sure seems like software that insists you click OK on a contract giving someone other than you full rights to access and manipulate all of the information on your computer before you have permission to use it -- like Microsoft's own -- is suspicious.

But rather than call the hotline, there are a few more productive things you can do to show your opposition to "Anti-Piracy Day".

First, it's best to not bother copying Windows, illegally or otherwise -- use free software instead. Try out a fully free distribution of GNU/Linux. Indicate your interest in free software by creating a user page on the FSF Groups wiki.

Second, let your representatives in government know your stance. Unfortunately Microsoft isn't the only group pushing this kind of propaganda lately. On October 13th, President Bush signed a bill misleadingly called PRO-IP into law that, among other nasty provisions, funds the production of exactly this kind of material to be distributed to state and local law enforcement agencies with taxpayer dollars. You can make a statement against overzealous copyright enforcement and in favor of freedom and sharing by writing to your Senator and your representatives.

It's Saturday morning and not *too* terribly early. Sixty free software activists start arriving at Encuentro 5, reviving with coffee and getting ready to celebrate Software Freedom Day in Boston.

We began with an eye-opening keynote from Aaron Swartz, Watchdog.net

He pointed out how our taxes pay to maintain governmental records and databases and yet citizens who want to read these materials are often thwarted by red tape and fees -- fees for digital information which, as we all know, should be nearly cost-free to duplicate. He's been using free software to make government records and other public domain material easily available and searchable by the public. He implored us to all call him, if we want to help, but I'm pretty sure email works too.

Next we broke out for workshops. One track was dedicated to free software graphics tools. Mairin Duffy lead us off with a "dive right in" overview on how to use GIMP, and Inkscape to create all sorts of fabulous looking posters and graphics. Next up was Bassam Kundali, an animation artist, who's been using Blender to make short movies. Running concurrently, the Plone workshop had a particularly heavy FSF staff presence since we use Plone for our websites. Nate Aune and Aaron Van Derlip covered a good bit of ground, including Plone's high security ratings and how to start building a Plone site from scratch. Following that presentation board member, Mako Hill, and FSF manager of operations, John Sullivan explained how anyone could hack a digital camera or tweak the Freerunner from OpenMoko.

We broke for lunch and multi-player Frozen Bubble. Dessert was an excellent and mammoth cake made by Sarah Abbott. More than one person went back for a second piece as we settled down to watch the Fry video. Campaigns manager, Joshua Gay updated the crowd on some of our newest work; including our campaign to End Software Patent Abuse.

While we wheeled through a series of Lightning Talks (6 minute presentations, scheduled the day of the event) on everything from a formal math commons to free software at law schools, we were treated to a surprise appearance by RMS. It seems his travel plans had changed at the last minute and so the founder of the GNU project was able to come by and address the crowd. He exhorted us to think of the GNU project's 25 year history as a foundation for the work to come and encouraged people to keep pushing for a completely free system. Of course, the best way to do that would be to hack on one of the High Priority Projects listed here.

Thanks to everyone who participated and see you next year!

Also available in Spanish, Ogg en crecimiento.

Visit PlayOgg.org and share your favorite Ogg Friendly sites

The recent launch of Stephen Fry's film in celebration of GNU's 25th anniversary has been a success on a number of levels — including for PlayOgg.org , the campaign for free audio and video formats. Worldwide, people have reached out to thank us and offer their support, including dozens of volunteers who have translated the film into over 24 languages. For free software users, streaming the Fry film in Ogg Theora is a joy. One reason for this is that the video will first attempt to play using the users's free software media player of choice, but, even if that fails, the video will stream through the free software Cortado Java Applet.

We borrowed this way of doing things (plus the code itself) from the Wikimedia community, who uses it throughout a number of projects, including Wikipedia. (Special thanks to Gregory Maxwell for helping us with the video and directing our attention toward the Cortado player). In fact, more and more sites are starting to stream Ogg Theora for video, with and without Cortado. Recently, DailyMotion.com released a channel for OLPC XO users to share and exchange Ogg Theora videos at http://olpc.dailymotion.com, and the Metavid project out of the University of California Santa Cruz maintains a large archive of videos of the US Congress in Ogg Theora at http://metavid.ucsc.edu.

And things are looking up on the audio front as well, with more and more sites casting Ogg Vorbis streams and downloads. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has been streaming Ogg for quite some time (CBC Radio 1, 2, and 3), as well as Germany's Deutschlandradio. More recently the U.S. National Public Radio station affiliate, WBUR Boston has begun streaming Ogg Vorbis. And, after a brief visit to New Zealand last August by Richard Stallman, we received word from Radio New Zealand that they had begun providing Oggcasts of much of their programming.

Ogg is on the rise and this is good news for end-users everywhere, but the really good news is that we expect things to get even better. With Mozilla's recent announcement of adding native Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis support to their browsers, we expect many more sites will begin streaming Ogg. So, we need your help in collecting as many Ogg Friendly sites as we can so that we can add them to our RSS feed of Ogg Friendly sites on PlayOgg.org. If you know of any sites we do not have listed, please email a link and a short description of the site to campaigns@fsf.org.

Last week SGI released a new version of the SGI Free License B. The terms of this license are identical to the terms of the X11 License, with an optional notification clause added on for convenience. It is a free software license.

Previous versions of the SGI Free License B were nonfree. Luckily for us, however, they included this clause:

Once Covered Code has been published under a particular version of the License, Recipient may... choose to use such Covered Code under the terms of any subsequent version published by SGI.

So, now that SGI has released a new, free version of the license, users can take advantage of its terms. SGI has just made a large and invaluable contribution to free 3D software, and we're very thankful to them for that.

Unfortunately, today it still isn't be possible for free system distributions like gNewSense to add OpenGL support back to xorg just yet—there are still a few legal loose ends that need to be tied up first. But we're getting right to work on resolving those issues, and we're confident that we're going to be successful.

Here's the deal: all of the code that SGI contributed to Mesa is covered by the SGI Free License B, so that is all free software now. Most of the code that SGI contributed to xorg is available under this license too, but there are a few exceptions. A little bit of the code was released under the GLX Public License. That code can be found in these files:

• proto/glproto/glxint.h
• xserver/GL/glx/glxext.c
• xserver/hw/dmx/glxProxy/glxext.c

Since that code was originally contributed, two things have happened in parallel. First, developers outside of SGI have been changing it to better meet xorg's needs. Second, SGI later released their original code under the SGI Free License B.

Because it has been released under the SGI Free License B, the code in those files that comes directly from SGI is free software. However, we can't make the same assumption about the changes that other developers made—that code is still covered under the GLX Public License, and still nonfree. We need to get permission from those developers to release their contributions under a free license as well.

Right now, it looks like there have been somewhere between ten and twenty people who made changes to code released under the GLX Public License. We plan to work with them and the rest of the xorg team to get their contributions under an appropriate free software license. We hope that this process will take less than a month. And once it's done, a complete, modern OpenGL implementation will be available to the entire free software community.

Check back at this blog for progress updates as we get the rest of this sorted out and ensure freedom for 3D rendering.