I believe part of the issue is the difficulty of conceding the matter when it comes to workarounds (designed to bring people in a broken, non-free environment to parity of experience with everyone else) and still holding the line when it comes to enhancements that should have a freely available underpinning. Which, if I understood correctly, was the nature of the original suggestion. That kind of situation could lead us to dependency on proprietary software, or force people with a hardcore approach to freedom in their own environment to accept that they can only get an inferior experience. And what's a workaround or an enhancement may fluctuate in different contexts.
Anyway, if you want to know better what the board's position was or is, understand the rationale for it, evaluate if a particular deployment would raise concerns, or make the case for a change, I would suggest starting with Kat Walsh. She has as good a grasp of the issues here as anyone on the board, and her views would carry weight with other board members.
--Michael Snow
Michael Dale wrote:
If that is in fact the present board stance it should A) It should be stated somewhere and B) be lobbied to be changed.
The only statements I have seen from the board had to do with free formats. What do free formats have to do with targeting propitiatory applet interpreters?
If Danese is interpreting something specific she should point us to that.
There are complete free tool-chains for flash applet code, compilation, and runtime.
It would be complicated to construct such a rule without going against a lot of what we are already doing. Ie We have lots of custom IE markup and javascript workarounds. Hence we are targeting a proprietary interpreter. The Cortado video applet for example also has custom code to support MS Java VM etc.
If free software flash applet code gets read by a propitiatory applet and it helps give a large set of users an experience that is nearly identical to the free software solution, then I really see no problem with that, and its not very different from what we area already doing.
A flash applet as transitional technology to support older browsers should be understood as very similar to 'making javascript work in IE'. If instead you relied on some proprietary sub-system of IE to achive the same thing with custom js/ actionsScript its really not that different.
Of course feature and experience parity with free software solutions is a good rule to have. Which maybe what is being referenced here?
And using free formats for audio/ video is of course very important and something I have supported for years.
peace, --michael
On 09/17/2010 02:42 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
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
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l