What will SonicBlue do several years from now when WMA support is considered a "must have" in order to effectively compete in the marketplace and Microsoft tells them "replace Linux with Windows CE or risk paying a higher license fee for WMA". Or what if the WMA libraries are suddenly no longer available for Linux? Or "the WMA libraries are still avilable for LInux, but they cost more" etc. Laugh and call it paranoid if you want, but the comapany's history demonstrates they will do exactly that if they think they can get away with it.

Note, this senario doesn't even require that WMA destroys MP3 in the marketplace-- all that's required is for WMA to be considered a MAJOR audio format alongside MP3.

Anyone who believes WMA is free is kidding themselves. Why would Microsoft want to waste time developing a free format? The only reason is to extract software royalties and/or use it as a weapon to help maintain the dominance of Windows.

Lastly, the name tells you everything you need to know: "WINDOWS Media Format". i.e. inferior or unavailable on all non-Windows platforms. If that isn't the case yet, it will be later on. Anyone here remember how DCOM was touted by Microsoft as being cross platform and how Software AB would implement it on other platforms, including Linux? That proved to be nothing more than a lie in order to buy mindshare among IT managers for DCOM.