I've found it really frustrating to learn that many people in the developer world and indeed the world in general stupidly mixes 'key' selling words like 'Open Standards', 'Open Source' etc.. wrongly.

Here is what the Director, BBC Future Media & Technology had to say about seeing AAC and H.264 being adopted in the BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/08/open_industry_standards_for_au.html.

After reading that, I think it can be concluded that Erik Huggers is not suitable for the job. Either he is rediculously not clued up. OR he is in the pockets of Apple.

AAC _requires_ a patent license to implement. It is NOT open standards. Ogg Vorbis and Theora can very well be! (At this time apparently no one knows whether there are hidden patents associated with those technologies)

In any case, this is more reasons not to have software patents in the first place. Erik Huggers could be right that they're open standards in the UK as software patents are not recognised. However we live in a world, not a single country. Half the world do acknowledge software patents.

Need a new CPU or graphics card? Get AMD.