[Foundation-l] Response to message by thread breaking nazi.

[David Gerard]

On 19/01/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> The thing that jumps out at me is the unqualified use of "must". This
> policy would make it impossible to use content for which there are no
> free formats (not that I can think of any examples of such content at
> the moment). Is that intentional? A "where possible" could be added to
> get around it if it's not intentional. (I'm undecided on whether it
> would be good to completely ban such material or not.)


Are there formats that *cannot* be transcoded into something free?

(e.g. the Library of Congress has some fantastic US public domain
scans ... as TIFFs; but these can be made into PNGs losslessly. MPEG2
is unacceptable, transcode to Theora isn't *too* lossy, MS Word can be
transformed into ODF [even though Wikimedia only allows OpenOffice 1.x
and not ODF as yet], etc.)


- d.