On 29/09/06, Ilya Haykinson haykinson@gmail.com wrote:
We say we want to encourage adoption of open formats. That's fine and dandy -- let's only allow open formats in uploads. But a large part of our mission is delivering content and I feel that we've been burying our head in the sand by pretending that there's no problem with access. I would venture to say that the vast majority of our users cannot watch or hear any multimedia files off of our websites. I would also suggest that they are not likely to, in the next several years at best.
I suggest that if we change our attitude and allow alternative, actually-workable presentation of our media, we will be more correctly fulfilling our mission. Let's allow Flash for audio and video.
I think we all recognise that there is a problem with access, but I do not think that the solution to this problem is the use of non-free formats. The most important reason for this is that I'm not sure we could be considered to be delivering "free content" if it is delivered in a patent-laden format.
It is important that we (the project) do not sacrifice our ideals and aims for the problems of this particular year. We should focus our energy on finding solutions which enable us to continue delivering truly free content to users. The suggestion that we convince Mozilla to bundle OGG with Firefox sounds good to me. Another possibility is that we could also come up with methods for delivering the codecs to the end user more easily.