From their website (http://xiph.org), "The Xiphophorus company is a distributed group of Free and Open Source programmers working to protect the foundations of Internet multimedia from reckless domination by purely self-serving corporate interests. Our purpose is to support free, open protocols and software that ultimately serve the larger public, developer, and business communities."
They maintain the ogg vorbis source code and utilities, the excellent cdparanoia program for ripping CDs, and icecast, for streaming MP3 files. Besides their quality programming, even their logos are cool. I especially like the laser-playback-head-of-omniscience. =)