The Mozilla team has announced that Fiirefox 3.1 will come with native support for Theora and Vorbis media. So, this means that:

1. open source media can become a bit more mainstream (finally moving away the proprietary mp3 monopoly);
2. no longer will we have to install Firefox plugins to see embedded audio and video files (as long as they’re in .ogg format)

The code is already out, available in Firefox’s nightly builds releases for large scale testing.

We have a bunch of Theora and Vorbis files and the quality is pretty good (some say ogg audio is even better than mp3). If you’d like to see/hear for your for yourself, go to Jamendo.org, they have tons of music files you can download in ogg, and you can check out the Wikimedia page to watch some ogg videos.

Released yesterday, Firefox 3 has surely surpassed its objective of 1 million downloads in 24 hours. A new world record!! (No one actually knows if there was a record to be broken…)

Mozilla’s site went down but at the end of the day everything went well. On our office HQ, the Ubuntu install already has FF 3 installed and the same on our Windows install.

The count of downloads at the moment this article is being written registers at over 8.5 million copies.  A pretty impressive number. The largest number of downloads are coming from the US, Germany, the UK, and Italy.

If you haven’t downloaded it yet:   

Today, is Document Freedom Day! A day to raise awareness for open document standards.

I’ve been dealing with computers for over 15 years now and have gone through several, several different programs and different upgrade versions. It has been a constant hassle throughout the years having to purchase the latest version of program XYZ to be able to open files created by other people that have upgraded their software. Or, not being able to work well with people working on different OS and using different softwares for the same type of document. Take now the MS Office 2007…

Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were file formats that you could open anywhere? I don’t mean in your office or house, I mean on your cell phone, on your Linux computer, MacOS X, Windows, etc. That is the goal of open standards format. The file would always be accessible, years from now and in different operating systems or programs.

This is the beauty of Open Standards and Open Document Format (ODF). There are also open source multimedia formats such as Theora (video) and Vorbis (audio).

Apologies for reporting this a bit late on the day, but there is still plenty of time to raise awareness for Open Standards. Spread the word and use it!

OpenOffice.org has just released OpenOffice version 2.4.0. At this moment, mysteriously there is no information coming from the main website, but you can download it through Filehippo. Sorry, no change log yet, no information as to what is new, and on my Linux distro OpenOffice still is showing as the most recent version so I’m assuming version 2.4 is Windows only.

[Update (03/27): here is the press release, the new features list, and the direct download page, it works on Linux!!]

Speaking of OOo, their website has just gone through a nice change of style. Much more user friendly and organized. Maybe they are spending time tweaking the new website and forgot to update it delayed updating it.

Speaking of VirtualBox, Sun Microsystem has just announced that it has purchased innotek (the makers of VirtualBox).

Sun states: “Now, as part of the Sun xVM portfolio, VirtualBox will have the support of Sun’s global development community, field resources and partners to make VirtualBox even more compelling to developers and end users, driving greater adoption across a broad set of communities.”

Sun is really pushing for open source, this is the second deal it announced so far this year after the huge purchase of MySQL. What do you think, are these deals beneficial for the open source community?