Are there licensing fees for distributing, selling, or streaming media in the Ogg Vorbis format like there are in other formats, such as MP3?
No. • If there aren’t any licensing fees, how are you going to make money off the format? Will you charge fees later, after Vorbis becomes popular? The benefits of a patent-free, license-free format outweigh the concerns of making money directly from the format. The Vorbis format will always be free and in the public domain. Xiph.org is investigating a variety of models for funding development, some of which may include licensing non-free Vorbis-related programs and libraries to commercial projects. Nevertheless, the reference encoder and decoder will always be open source and third parties will always be free to modify or reimplement them. • I’ve heard that Vorbis is a “lossy” codec. What does this mean? There are two broad classes of compression algorithms: lossless and lossy. Lossless compression algorithms produce compressed data that can be decoded to output that is identical to the original. Zip is a very common example of a lossless compression format. FLAC is a lossless compres
