I agree with you completely, that Flash is useful as a transitional technology. But I got a very firm no from Danese who is interpreting what the Board has said in the past.
There was a thread on Wikitech-L about this (you were probably distracted at the time due to family stuff).
http://www.mail-archive.com/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/msg08550.html
On 9/17/10 2:25 PM, Michael Dale wrote:
On 09/17/2010 12:24 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
Discussions about using closed source tools are not taboo. Not at all, I think we should continue to review decisions about tools. I myself have raised questions about (for instance) our decision to never use Flash, even if we use a 100% free toolchain.
I don't think we were ever against flash player as part of a tool set to widely support free formats.
Flash is widely deployed consistent applet environment, there is no reason to avoid supporting it if it helps distribute ~free~ content. For example we have had brief talks of adding flash svg viewer so that IE users could better interact with SVG files. And you can be sure that once adobe ships native support for WebM it will provide much better experience for IE visitors to view free format videos than the fragmented java VM ecosystem that cortado has to run in.
The foundation has only had a position of support for free formats, it has to my knowledge never stated any position against proprietary clients viewing free content or open source applets in proprietary platforms. Most of our visitors use IE after all.
--michael
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