oakley:

*Nobody* who hasn't been living under a rock considers WMA "open." If I did use WMA, I'd realize the risk that Microsoft could take it away, forcing me to re-rip everything. If the fidelity was good enough at lower bitrates, I'd consider it. If it was gapless, and MP3 couldn't be made gapless, I'd really consider it. If they did take it away, I'd let out an "oh well" and re-rip. I am not under any illusion that it's open, but I am aware that it's a better codec bit for bit.

In all likelihood I won't end up using WMA, but I will consider it.

danthep:

Granted, Microsoft's ownership of the OS gives them the ability to willfully prevent any software from running. We're not going to see an open-sourced WMA encoder in our lifetime. I understand all that. But I would gladly keep a Windows 2000 partition around specifically for encoding if they did, say, eliminate the Empeg's WMA version from Windows 2004 or whatever. If it's a better codec, with higher fidelity at lower bitrates, I'll use it.

not directed at anyone in particular:

The other thing to keep in mind is that MP3 isn't exactly royalty free either, and Fraunhofer has been going after some of the big hitters who use their technology without paying royalties. This hasn't really pinched the MP3-encoding consumer yet, and the cat is probably already out of the bag, but there's no guarantee MP3 will be safe, either. As long as we all have our original source CD's, we're good to go, we can just re-rip to whatever format we need to.