On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
My understanding, from a previous mailing list discussion, was that we can
Your understanding is entirely different from my own. Possibly we were reading different mailing lists?
My takeaway from the lists I was on was better summed by by this comment by Brion Vibber in response to Kaltura's video software: "We won't even consider touching the software itself with a hundred-foot pole until they can support the free environment and formats we require. That's a condition they're well aware of."
As long as the encoder license fees are reasonable in proportion to our other operational costs, adding proprietary video formats alongside free ones can only increase the dissemination of knowledge and assist in our educational mission.
As you can see from the other replies here, several people believe that supporting non-free formats would be detrimental to the long-term educational mission -- because the mission is not fulfillable so long as people feel forced to pay a codec tax on content they take from us. Just because Wikimedia can afford it does not mean that everyone can or should. (Regarding fees, most formats have per-use fees as well as encoder fees.)
You could just as easily say "As long as the licensing fees are reasonable in proportion to our other operational costs, adding commercial stock photography archives to Wikipedia alongside free images can only increase the dissemination of knowledge and assist in our educational mission." WMF could easily afford to license stock archives. Yet it has not. The great demand for images in Wikipedia allowed Commons to succeed, and now the whole world has a liberally-licensed stock photography archive that they can use.
In any case, mere assertions are not a compelling argument. If you disagree that freely-licensed formats are essential for realizing the promise of freely-licensed content, I'm sure many people would be willing to talk that out. If you don't think that sticking to free formats exclusively drives adoption, that too can be discussed... or if you don't agree that realizing the promises of freely licensed content are part of the mission, likewise.