Letter to Nokia

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After some discussion on the Advocacy mailing list, I decided to start drafting a letter to Nokia here to convince Nokia to implement support for Ogg Vorbis (possibly more Xiph.org technologies, but Vorbis is the most important to me) in their mobile phones. The draft here is inspired by the MailOgging page. This is a letter to Nokia, but letters to other manufacturers of mobile phones or media players should follow.

Contents of the letter

  • What we are asking Nokia to do
  • The reasons why Ogg Vorbis should be supported
  • Why it shouldn't be a problem to implement support

Sending the letter

  • Preferably it should not be addressed to Nokia's customer service, but a person inside Nokia who has authority to make decisions on matters like this.
  • We should CC this letter to important news websites, like LWN and Slashdot for example, to obtain more public awareness.
  • Perhaps we should also start a petition at PetitionOnline to show how many people desire support for Ogg Vorbis in Nokia products, and that it's not merely some hardcore Ogg Vorbis fans who want to see support from Nokia.
  • The Free Software Foundation started the Play Ogg campaign, possibly we could make a reference to this in the letter, if it's relevant.

The letter

<Nokia's adress>

<month name> <day number>, 2007

Subject: support of the Ogg Vorbis audio codec in Nokia mobile products

Dear Sir/Madam,

The Xiph.Org Foundation would like to ask your attention for the missing support of the Ogg Vorbis [1] audio codec in Nokia's products. We would like to ask Nokia to consider implementing support for the Ogg Vorbis audio codec in its products.

Unlike the proprietary MP3, AAC and WMA audio codecs, the Ogg Vorbis audio codec is completely free to implement, it is not encumbered by patents and does not require license fees of any kind. Because of the problems with the aforementioned proprietary audio codecs requiring license fees, it is not possible for many open source operating systems to support those proprietary audio codecs. Hence, the Ogg Vorbis audio codec is the preferred format for the users of those operating systems. For example, popular websites like Jamendo [2] and the Magnatune music store [3] offer music encoded with the Ogg Vorbis audio codec. There are many other hardware manufacturers which have designed products that support the Ogg Vorbis audio codec [4].

Currently it is already possible to play music encoded with the Ogg Vorbis audio codec on Nokia mobile phones by using the third-party software OggPlay [5]. However, it would be preferable if Nokia mobile products would support playback of Ogg Vorbis audio files, so that users would not need to rely on third-party software.

Even though the amount of Nokia's customers that would benefit from Ogg Vorbis support appears to be small, Nokia should take into account that support for Ogg Vorbis will win Nokia a lot of goodwill in the open source/free software community, if not an advantage over the mobile phone market, and that Ogg Vorbis implementation is royalty-free.

Sincerely,

Alexander van Loon
<my adress>

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis
[2] http://www.jamendo.com/en/
[3] http://www.magnatune.com/
[4] http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers
[5] http://symbianoggplay.sourceforge.net/

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