Adventures in Open Software

I really like the attitude behind open software -- programs made on what amounts to the wikipedia model, (though open software came before wikipedia). The idea of making a program's code freely available so that people can not only download the program for free, but work and collaborate on improving it if they wish -- or even just customizing it for themselves -- is really refreshing. Especially when compared to monolithic corporations designing their program's code, keeping it a secret, and asserting ownership over it. It's the kind of networking and mutual empowerment that actually seems to fulfill the promise of the Internet -- as opposed to most of the stuff that actually goes on the Internet. (I'm still not sure how to react to the fact that Facebook has replaced pornography as the greatest use the Internet is put to).

I assume most of us are pretty familiar with Mozilla Firefox, an open-software program that's at least as good as Internet Explorer or Safari (I like it better than both, personally). A program I recently started using is OpenOffice, which is designed to be able to be an open-source substitue for Microsoft Office and related products. The nice thing is that it can read and save in a number of formats, including Microsoft's .doc extension, (as well as its own open format, .odt). So far I'm quite happy with it, though its endnotes function isn't quite as flexible as I'd like; certainly I prefer it to the latest version of Microsoft Word, which I just find confusing and annoying.

I've been less successful with trying to switch to using .ogg files instead of .mp3s. Apparently several companies have tried to assert ownership of the mp3 format, and the most successful one has managed to collect millions of dollars in royalties for a format people use for music files every day. (A little like charging radio stations and their listeners for using a certain Hz to encode and pick up their signal). I've tried downloading a couple of media players featuring .ogg files, but have been pretty dissatisfied with them. They won't display what album a song is from, have bad playlist functions, (an important organizational tool at least for me), etc. There are add-ons for iTunes that allow you to play .ogg files but then you can't burn them to cds. (You can't load cds in that format either, but there is freeware that will do it; what I couldn't find was anything that burned cds).

It's possible that there are solutions out there, but after downloading four or five programs to try and make the .ogg format work for me — all on dial-up — without any success, I threw up my hands and gave up. At least for now it's mp3's for me, even if I don't like it.

As far as I'm concerned, the onus is on Mac (and Windows, but I know less about that, and Mac does a reputation for being user-friendly and relatively progressive) to actually make a file format like ogg work in its player, what with it becoming an increasingly common format for savvy and freedom-loving computer users, as well as the format sites like wikipedia use. It's stupid and short-sighted that iTunes can't play and perform other normal functions with .ogg files to begin with, and that even after the add-ons many of the regular functions don't work in spite of the open programmers' best efforts. Purely from a selfish, capitalistic viewpoint, you'd think it would actually be in iTunes interest to use, if not push, an open format like ogg, instead of using a format that is owned by another company.

But what do I know...