How non-free do we consider Flash to be? The Gnash player appears to be making good progress. Would it be acceptable to permit useful Flash files which work in Gnash and don't require non-free codecs to be uploaded?
I did not see any issues with patents mentioned in the relevant Wikipedia article. The old Macromedia Flash website lists a US patent on "creating gradient fills", but that seems so bizarre as to pose no real threat.
(Let's keep this separate, for now, from the question when a format like Flash would be appropriate, content-wise. I'd like to fully understand the "freeness" first.)
2007/3/6, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
How non-free do we consider Flash to be? The Gnash player appears to be making good progress. Would it be acceptable to permit useful Flash files which work in Gnash and don't require non-free codecs to be uploaded?
I did not see any issues with patents mentioned in the relevant Wikipedia article. The old Macromedia Flash website lists a US patent on "creating gradient fills", but that seems so bizarre as to pose no real threat.
(Let's keep this separate, for now, from the question when a format like Flash would be appropriate, content-wise. I'd like to fully understand the "freeness" first.)
I know too little about the specific case to say something about it, but in my opinion the following should hold in freedoms: * one should be free to create material in the format * one should be free to change and republish what others have made in the format, provided that other person agrees * one should be free to build one's own program to show/play/whatever the format and translate material in the format into other applicable formats * one should be free to build one's own program to create or edit material in the format * the definition of the format should be freely available
Furthermore, there should also be some 'free as in beer' freedoms: * free players should be available for all three major systems (Windows, Linux and Mac) * preferably, all common players and editors for that type of media should support the format (that is, if Photoshop or GIMP does not support a certain image format, it might be better to not include it)
Non-freedoms which in my opinion are NOT a reason to reject a format would be: * Not being allowed to change or extend the format itself * Any patents that could not be used to encumber the abovementioned freedoms, or for which the patent holder has explicitly stated to allow the abovementioned without restrictions
In a related question, how free is PDF? The format may not be altered and still called "PDF", but everyone including the FSF can live with that. There's plenty of non-Adobe PDF creators and readers. What there is a lack of is editors, but it's essentially a write-once format in any case.
- d.
On 3/6/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
How non-free do we consider Flash to be? The Gnash player appears to be making good progress. Would it be acceptable to permit useful Flash files which work in Gnash and don't require non-free codecs to be uploaded?
I did not see any issues with patents mentioned in the relevant Wikipedia article. The old Macromedia Flash website lists a US patent on "creating gradient fills", but that seems so bizarre as to pose no real threat.
For what application? I see that you say 'don't require non-free codecs', but it's not clear that you're aware of the status of codecs in flash:
For video support the flash plugin contains a H.263 video and a MP3 audio codec.
It's not possible to write MP3 software which does not infringe 5,105,463 among several other patents (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6388273.stm Weee!).
H.263 is covered by a pool of patents similar to MPEG-4.
Flash player 8 and above also includes the VP6 video codec. On2 has patents they license for VP6 use, but overall they are pretty cool company though, so I'm not fully sure where that stands. I expect that requiring flash player 8 would leave Java as a more compatible web toy solution.
Unlike the Java video player implementations the codec isn't actually 'written in flash'. Actionscript is a poor match for doing lots of data manipulation. I understand that someone nearly has a Vorbis codec working actually written in actionscript, but it's too slow to be useful.
So for video, flash does not look good. The use of cortado in Java would be much better. (http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/). Success rate of the inline Java audio player hasn't been bad, and cortado should be even more compatible with older JVMs.
A bigger concern I have with the freedom of flash doesn't have anything to do with patents: There are no free authoring tools, other than some hacks that are used for dynamic authoring. I think this is a pretty big killer. Nothing we need for authoring today requires proprietary software.
If we're looking to allow users to submit flash there another freedom related issue:
Since the toolchain is proprietary and built around desktop usage we'll be stuck with the 'opaque object' problem. In short, for downloadable turing complete software (Java, Flash, JS) it can be impossible to fully understand what the software will do. Perhaps on the 3rd of the month it displays the goastse image, perhaps it exploits the sandbox and steals your data. In cases where we have the source, it's possible to require the software be simple enough that no such tricks could be easily inserted. As a result I previously suggested that if we ever accept user submitted java that we have people submit source and we compile it on our side. Because the flash authoring tools are proprietary this option is closed to us.
These are just some quick points, a little more knowledge of the intended application would help me drill in and look for freedom related limitations.
I hope that I'll be given the opportunity to comment on the non-freedom related aspects, since I think there are some significant issues. Again, knowing the application is critical.