The-Source.com

Oof. ZDNet’s Ed Bott attacks the FSF hard in “Ogg versus the world: don’t fall for open-source FUD“.

One issue

Mr. Bott calls out some of the points made on the PlayOgg FAQ as being “FUD”, “outright lies”, “technically absurd”, “factually dead wrong”, and maybe even downright anti-kittens-with-funny-captions-underneath.

Let’s look at one of his examples (we’ll only take the first one, but the entire article is chock-full of fallacious fun).

From the PlayOgg FAQ:

Unlike MP3, Ogg Vorbis is not restricted by patents. Microsoft had to pay $1.5 billion after being sued for using MP3 without a license. With Ogg Vorbis, they would have been safe!

Mr. Bott offers two criticisms:

That is an outright lie. Microsoft did not have to pay a penny to anyone as the result of a lawsuit on the MP3 format.
[...]
That overlooks the inconvenient fact that the first stable version of the Ogg Vorbis reference software (version 1.0) was not released until July 2002. It’s hard to imagine how Microsoft could have chosen the “safe” open-source option when it didn’t exist yet.

The problem

The truth is that as things turned out, Microsoft did not have to pay $1.5 billion. It was on the hook, and then off again six months later when a judge overturned the jury verdict.

Does that make the FAQ an “outright lie”? You be the judge.

If the last sentence off that PlayOgg FAQ had been a little more explicit and read “With a patent-free format like Ogg Vorbis, they would have been safe!”, would that be better? Would it change the validity of the point?

Of course not -  the point the PlayOgg FAQ is attempting to make is perfectly valid: there are no (first-party) patent restrictions on Ogg Vorbis[1], and MP3 has more than a few licensing and patent issues.

How about if the other patents that Microsoft did have to pay for in the same dispute with Alcatel-Lucent – to the tune of $512 million dollars – were mentioned?  True, they weren’t audio codec patents, but they were still the results of “infringing” on software patents.

Isn’t that the over-riding concern behind the PlayOgg campaign?

The polemics

People like Mr. Bott who carry water for organizations like Microsoft are going to resort to hypocrisy, hair-splitting and strawman-bashing tactics.

For example, Mr. Bott seems quite content to quote the CEO of the MPEG-LA asserting that “no one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent free” in the very article where he is taking the FSF to task for FUD.

For another example, Mr. Bott seems quite content to characterize the FSF as “open-source advocates” – a very sloppy generalization – in the very article where he is taking the PlayOgg FAQ author to task for making sloppy generalizations.

It is my contention this sort of rhetoric always occurs when people are more interested in “scoring points” than reaching the truth of the matter or engaging in honest debate. There is a mindset that if you can score enough points you somehow change reality and win the argument even if you are wrong. I don’t get that way of thinking, but it seems to be quite common.

The prevention

So, be aware of that mindset when you write. There will always be someone out there ready to take a cheap shot or play integrity-free games with the point you are trying to make. You can’t stop them – because they aren’t after the truth - but you don’t have to give up free points on the goal either.

[1] It would be difficult to claim there are no patent restrictions at all on any non-trivial software, because of the currently terribly broken software patent system in the United States. Since patent trolls or any random 3rd party can claim a patent violation, the best one can claim is that the producer itself has declined to restrict the software.

Usually I’m not this pedantic, but since being a bit more pedantic is sort of the whole point of this article …