Author: Steven Garrity

The Catch-22 of Open Format Adoption, Part 2: Instant Messaging

by Steven Garrity

I wrote last week about the catch-22 of open audio formats. Online music isn’t the only domain in which open formats are emerging, nor is it the most significant. The world of instant messaging (IM) is another case where open protocols have emerged to compete with their proprietary predecessors.

Chances are if you’re online to read this article, you use one of the major commercial IM services. MSN, AIM (which now includes iChat users and ICQ), and Yahoo’s IM services are all enormously popular.

In this case, Jabber is the free/open-source alternative. While the end-user experience is basically the same, Jabber has a different significantly architecture from the dominant IM.

I’m not an expert in this area, so I’ll keep my description as basic as possible. The Jabber protocol is similar to the email infrastructure, where anyone can setup a server that clients connect to. The server then relays messages to other clients on that same server, or to other servers to reach other clients. Like with email, then, you can setup your own server – though this isn’t practical for most people. The more likely scenario involves companies or internet services providers (ISPs) setting up Jabber servers much like they do with email. This differs from MSN, Yahoo, and AIM in that each of these services have their own central server systems that are controlled by the company that owns each network.

As with music file formats, most people don’t care about instant messaging protocols. They just want to chat with their friends and co-workers. You have to use the same protocol/service as your friends, or you’ve got no-one to talk to.

There are some key software applications that can help bridge the gap between proprietary protocols and the open Jabber protocol. Several instant messaging client applications, including Gaim, Trillian, and Adium, allow you to connect to all of the major IM networks. You can have contacts from MSN, AIM, and others, all on the same contact list as your Jabber contacts.

These multiple-protocol clients help ease the transition to open protocols. If I were to switch entirely to Jabber today, I would no longer be able to talk to many of my friends. However, using Gaim, I can use Jabber whenever possible, but still maintain contact with those of my friends still using proprietary protocols.

Of the 20 to 30 contacts I have in my instant messaging client, a little more than half of those are using Jabber. The remain contacts are either AIM, ICQ, or IRC (I’ve managed to drop any MSN contacts).

This is likely a higher ratio of Jabber-to-proprietary contacts than many. This is because at the small business where I work we have our own Jabber sever setup that allows us to have secure (and free) instant messaging (both for one-on-one chat and for group chats). The open-source nature of Jabber allows our company to easily control and manage our own instant messaging server. I would encourage other businesses to do the same. It has been a great tool for us.

The Catch-22 of Open Formats mini-series
  1. The Catch-22 of Open Format Adoption, Part 1: Music
  2. The Catch-22 of Open Format Adoption, Part 2: Instant Messaging (you are here)
  3. Part 3: Coming soon
 

The Catch-22 of Open Format Adoption, Part 1: Music

by Steven Garrity

We’re all familiar with the MP3 file format. As far as most people are concerned, the format implies free music. The software required to play MP3 files is usually free as well. That said, neither of these things necessarily follow from use of the MP3 format.

What most people don’t realize is that the MP3 format itself is not free. If you want to create a device or a piece of software that plays back or creates MP3 files, you have to pay Thomson Consumer Electronics for a license to do so.

Companies that sell products that support MP3 are paying Thomson for each sale. That means Microsoft Windows, Apple’s Mac OS X and iPod. This even applies to software that is free for the end-user to download, such as Apple’s iTunes or Winamp. That’s right – Winamp had to pay for a license for every copy of the player that all of us got to download for free.

What the heck is Ogg Vorbis?

There is an alternative format that is a technical match to MP3 that is not encumbered with patent or licensing issues. The Ogg Vorbis format is as good or better than MP3 and is completely free (both in terms of price and licensing).

Why, then, hasn’t Ogg Vorbis taken off? I see a few reasons for this. The first is that the term “MP3” became a brand name associated with free music. Companies involved in music-related products and services wanted to be able to say “MP3”.

Apple had the opportunity to make the move when they introduced iTunes and the iPod. Both are compatible with MP3, but the default format is AAC, something Apple presumably used for the ability to control playback (“digital rights management”).

So What?

The most significant reason that Ogg Vorbis didn’t overtake MP3 is that MP3 did what people wanted. End users weren’t paying the license fee. Winamp was free, iTunes was free. Why change?

We see the real problem with a non-free file format when free/open-source software starts to become more prevalent on the rest of the desktop. Completely free/open-source desktop Linux distributions cannot include support for MP3 playback, because they would have to track (and pay for) each download. As a result, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and other popular Linux distributions can’t play a simple MP3 file out of the box. This is because the file is simple, but the lisencing is not.

Why Not Just Use Ogg Vorbis, Then?

What then, is a music publisher who cares about free and open software to do? I produce an amateur radio show made available for download in MP3 format. I would like to publish in Ogg Vorbis format, but a lot of my potential listeners would have to jump through hoops to be able to play the show.

Consider John Q. Listener. He’d like to listen to my radio show on his new iBook. However, iTunes doesn’t support Ogg Vorbis playback by default. A plug-in is available, but is he really going to go install it just to listen to my dorky little show? Even if John does find a way to play the Ogg Vorbis files on his laptop, he won’t be able to play them on his iPod. The same goes for overwhelming majority of computer users who are running Windows.

I want to support the open file format, but I also want people to listen to my show. I want people walking around with my favourite songs on their iPod. What am I to do? I have three options:

  1. Publish only in MP3 – This works for everyone but a small number of Linux users (most of whom know how to get MP3 playback for their Linux computers anyhow). Free file format be damned, John Q. Listener is walking around with my show on his iPod.
  2. Publish only in Ogg Vorbis – People learn about the format. Some may even find the software required to play it on the Mac or Windows PC. However, many (most?) people won’t bother listening since they don’t have support for the file format already installed. No one with an iPod can listen to it (unless they convert it to MP3, and it’s not that good of a show to be worth that kind of time and effort). The world is a better place, but I’ll never get famous this way…
  3. Publish two versions, one in MP3 and one in Ogg Vorbis – many online media outlets go this route with streaming formats (publishing simultaneously in Real, Windows Media, Quicktime formats) to ensure the widest possible reach. However, this adds a new layer of complexity for my John Q. Listener. Now, instead of just downloading and listening, he has to choose between two formats. He doesn’t care, he just wants to rawk. Also, much of the benefit of publishing in Ogg Vorbis is now lost, since only those who are already familiar with it and using it will bother choosing it as a format.

I went with option . I’m still not entirely comfortable with this, but I want as many people as possible to hear by show. Obviously, I’m not writing here with a clear recommendation. Rather, I hope to highlight the benefits and issues surrounding the move to free/open formats.

I’ll be writing more about the catch-22 of open formats, and with a bit more optimism, in the coming days.

The Catch-22 of Open Formats mini-series
  1. The Catch-22 of Open Format Adoption, Part 1: Music (you are here)
  2. The Catch-22 of Open Format Adoption, Part 2: Instant Messaging
  3. Part 3: Coming soon
 

Acts of Volition Radio: Session 21

by Steven Garrity

Acts of Volition Radio: Session Twenty One

Many of you have likely seen the many weblog posts entitled “A Musical Baton” over the last few weeks. The chain-letter-like post asks the author to share a bit about the music they are enjoying, and pass the duty on to five more people. Having been passed the “baton” myself (thanks Garrett), I’ll let this, the 21st session of Acts of Volition Radio be my reply.

A Musical Baton. Recorded Saturday, May 29, 2005 by Steven Garrity. Run time: 55min.

Session Twenty One Playlist:

  1. Matt Mays & El Torpedo – Cocaine Cowgirl
  2. Stars – Your Ex-Lover Is Dead
  3. Nada Surf – Treading Water
  4. Simon & Garfunkel – The Only Living Boy In New York
  5. MxPx – Kings of Holleywood
  6. Mystery Machine – What I Want
  7. Pilate – Melt Into The Walls
  8. Extreme – Tragic Comic
  9. Ben Folds – Late

For more, see the previous Acts of Volition Radio sessions.

Acts of Volition Radio
Acts of Volition Radio
Acts of Volition Radio: Session 21
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Video from GUADEC, the GNOME User and Developer European Conference

by Steven Garrity

GUADEC logo

The GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC) is underway this weekend in Stuttgart, Germany. For those, like myself, who are unable to attend, the fine open-source media company, Fluendo is providing live streams and archived videos of the talks.

The talks from GUADEC day one are now available for download. The videos are encoded in the free/open-source Ogg Theora format. On Linux, anyone using a Gstreamer player, Helix, or VLC can play the videos. Windows users can install the plugin for Windows Media Player, and Mac users can use VLC

Thanks to Fluendo and the conference organizers for providing the videos.

Update: The talk by Ralph Giles of Xiph.org (the organization behind the Ogg Vorbis audio codec and the Theora video codec mentions that Yahoo is shipping the DirectShow (Windows Media) plugins for these open-source formats with their Yahoo Music service download. In simpler terms, this means that people who have download the Yahoo Music player can automagically play Ogg Vorbis and Theora files in Windows Media Player. Nice.

 

Thoughts on Tabs and Windows

by Steven Garrity

Tab screenshot

If you had asked me, before Firefox came along, if tabs were a good idea for a web-browser, I would have said no, absolutely not. The old Mozilla Browser had them, and Opera had them. Both were clunky and intrusive.

The real reason I would have thought it was a bad idea, though, is that tabs introduce a whole new metaphor to desktop document management. We already have windows – adding tabs inside windows just messes everything up. You can’t use existing operating system window management techniques to switch between tabs, such as Alt+Tab or the window-list taskbar. Why should some documents be in tabs and in a window, while others are each in their own window. It would be anarchy!

Yes, all of the above criticisms of tabs are true, but it doesn’t matter. Regardless of broken and mixed metaphors, after about two years of using Firefox (and the betas that led up to it), I use tabbed-browsing extensively.

Having used them for a while now, I have some thoughts one why tabs do work well for web browsing:

  • You don’t have to use tabs. You can use the browser without even knowing that tabbed-browsing is possible. Just go about your pre-tab browsing business and you’ll not be bothered. No one is forced to learn a new metaphor.
  • Tabs Work well maximized. A lot of my friends and family, especially those with relatively low screen resolutions (800×600 or 1024×768), always run all windows maximized. When running only maximized windows, tabs work almost exactly like new windows.
  • Windowing applications and documents is not always a great system. This article about the file-system browser in Gnome quotes a 1995 study by Microsoft that concluded that “[a]ll but the most advanced users did not understand how to manage overlapping windows efficiently.”
  • Tabs allow grouping of pages, like multiple workspaces in Linux/Unix systems. You can have a set of weblogs open in one window, and a set of work-related pages open in another. This isn’t a killer feature, but I’ve noticed myself doing this.
  • Tabs don’t need to be “managed”. Windows often need to be resized, moved, and rearranged in order to make the best use of their contents and of the rest of your desktop. This isn’t so with tabs. You can’t do any of those things to tabs. I suspect this is one of the reasons people often run all windows maximized – this also eliminates the need to ever move or resize windows.

One of the big disadvantages of tabs compared to windows is that you can never see the contents of two tabs simultaneously. With windows, you can arrange two windows side-by-side, or only partially overlapping. While this is useful in some cases (visual comparing two documents, typing in one windows while using another for reference, etc.), it is not often needed when browsing the web. You just don’t often need to see two web pages side-by-side, and in the few cases where you do, you still can (using windows).

It’s a good thing I wasn’t in charge of the user interface design for Firefox, because I was completely wrong. This is a good reminder that you cannot rely solely on your own intuition when designing software that people interact with.