On Jan 19, 2008 4:13 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 1/19/08, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
My understanding is that Michael Dale was told that Wikimedia would be using Kaltura and that it might consider metavid some day 'in the future'.
We've made no firm commitment to using Kaltura anywhere. This is the problem with speculation about leaked presentations:
Not about leaked presentations, you've ignored the rest of what I said. About the impression that you have given other people, and about what the planned press release your partner was circulating.
It's an impression you created, if that was an error, or a misunderstanding. Great. There is no reason to be otherwise defensive.
You need to start working to correct it, because this misconception is appearing on news sites like wildfire. For example: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/17/kaltura-partners-to-add-crowdsourced-vi...
Many months ago I asked if I could travel to Australia (on my own dime, none the less) to attend FOMS for Wikimedia.
Whom did you ask?
*You*.
I think I've said before that I am very frustrated by this organizations non-responsiveness, and failure to meet commitments. It's a near constant problem, which only appears to be getting worse over time.
Correct. Yet WMF is putting our press releases and calling for community help with one and not the other.
I'd be happy to have an open-ended discussion with Michael about ways we can drive open source interest in the project.
And other projects? The point is that Wikimedia hasn't. It's managed to give people the impression that it is too busy to work on these things. It manages to give *me* the impression that it is too busy to work with me.
And perhaps it is too busy, but if thats the case then it puts the lie to the claim that working with one party does not preclude working with others.
Many projects we could and should be working with have existed for years. Some have approached us. Some have submitted code, only to have it bit-rot and be forgotten.
[snip]
Wikimedia should always be accessible (including full participation) to people using only free software.
This much has universal agreement. But you are advocating an approach which does not place users of free system as equals, see below.
That makes sense -- because otherwise, projects like OLPC would run into problems when they want to access our content. One of the ongoing discussions we've had is whether it's OK or not to make things easy & friendly for people using proprietary systems (i.e. the vast majority of web users).
It's not okay for things for people to have to choose if they want freedom or ease of use.
If the free things are not easy, then they are not really free. They come with a price: the price is that you and all your friends must be techno-geeks for you to enjoy freedom. This isn't an acceptable situation.
It's also a situation which doesn't have to last: It is completely solved by avoiding the proprietary formats and helping the free formats become mainstream and gain adoption. So long as you continue to use the proprietary formats you are increasing their dominance through network-effects.
Getting over the hump has a cost, it requires building critical mass. But once it is done .. it's done.
I'm harping on it, but I'm not sure I've been heard: Once a format is truly free, once it has reasonable support and adoption, non-free formats just can't compete. The network effects are just too strong, free is too attractive a price, and freedom creates too much agility. This is why no one is promoting proprietary alternatives to JPG or HTML.
My position has been consistently that we should at the very least get a good evaluation of the cost of choosing not to support proprietary systems.
The words "choosing not to support proprietary systems" is a little misleading. Proprietary systems can a very frequently do read free formats, while the inverse is usually not true.
But I get what you are saying. We should know the cost of not distributing proprietary formated files to our users. I agree that we should, and would even if no one was advocating that we should do otherwise.
Measuring performance is good. I can't measure the success rate of the existing video player anymore, because it's been moved into the software proper (and I suspect the performance is somewhat different now due to bugs created and bugs removed).
We should also do some interpolation into the future in our measurements. Firefox will ship integrated support for free formats (our use, around the time you first advocated switching to flash, played some role in that too :) ). A past estimate is that ~46% of our http requests come from Firefox users. (though the number is probably biased because editors make more requests than most people). So that will be an additional group of users who gain robust support for free video/audio added to the groups that get support via Java, VLC, QT or other means.
WMF is not the Free Software Foundation;
Indeed, it is not, which is why I don't really understand the call of victory for getting a startup video app to release some source. It's nice, but I don't think that it's especially important to what we are doing.
our core mission isn't to promote free video & audio formats.
No, but it is to part of the effective mission to build a world where users have free knoweldge and the freedom to use it however they want. And without effectively free video/audio, they can't get there.
Imagine. I take some Wikimedia content. I build something new. I go to distribute my results. I can now choose between the freedom of a free format, or after paying some fees and accepting some restrictions I can putting up something that joe-average can easily view. Having to make that choice is not freedom.
In that situation there is no free format.
Today, free media formats are not that bad off: By last measure the stuff we were doing was working for a good majority of people.
But they are not quite yet up to the point where they are fully free in practice, and I can tell this because you are taking about the cost of not using proprietary formats. If free formats were widely enough adopted you wouldn't be advocating anything else.
Wikimedia is in a position to drive the adoption of free formats, and has already done a tremendous amount of work already in making that happen.
Beyond that, our community has direct with parallel distribution which hasn't worked too well... The Wikipedia weekly podcasts were offered off site in AAC/MP3/ and Ogg (AAC was required in order for the itunes stuff to work with it). Very frequently the ogg version would be broken or down for weeks at a time, not due to any fault in the Ogg software, but simply because most of the users would just click the mp3 link and go on with life. (it's also the case that the ogg formats were transcoded from one of the other compressed formats and was lower quality, etc)
And this is not some crime on our part: Supporting lots of things is hard and no one does it well.
The cheapest, and best, option long term is to support movement in a direction which will not require us to offer multiple overlapping options. Free formats are the only solution to achieve that, since they can be adopted by everyone, and always are once they are sufficiently successful.
So does, in my opinion, making it easy for users of proprietary systems to access our content and to participate in its development.
It really is a false notion that proprietary systems can't read free formats. Please avoid making that claim. It's very harmful because that wrong position is easily extended to the wrong position that I would advocate excluding users of proprietary software!
In the last few discussions we've had about this issue, you've consistently taken the side of what I deem isolationism:
Ahem. What you "deem". You've in the past made it quite clear to me that you dismiss my views as isolationist, zealotry, and failures to assume good faith. It makes it very difficult to discuss anything with you.
Rather than attacking my motives and character, can we please limit ourselves to discussing that which can be objectively discussed?
against Creative Commons,
I'm not against "Creative Commons", for it's too amorphous a group for almost anyone to be clearly against it.
I'm against some of the confusion that they create, I'm against some of their proposals. I'm against some of their techniques. I enjoy the things they do well. I'm against the idea that you must agree with all of something because part of it is really good. I'm am far from alone.
Many of the arguments I've made on that subject are ones which you, yourself, have made in the past.
If you'd like to point out where I appeared to be simply "against Creative Commons", I'd be glad to further explain the nuance of my position.
against parallel distribution,
The arguments I've leveled against parallel distribution are not unique to me. I think that there it is an important issue to discuss, other people seem to agree. I welcome you to discuss it further. ... Simply claiming that I am "against parallel distribution" as though that makes me a bad guy and walking away isn't fair.
Yes, I'm against it.. I am because I have a arguments to support that it is usually harmful to our mission, and whenever it is not harmful it is not needed.
Parallel distribution in proprietary formats has many similar to arguments against it as parallel distribution option as an option in anti-DRM clauses in free content licenses, which is the established precedent there. Though I think those are also positions you don't agree with.
It my view it's much more important to use only free formats, than any use of free software. The reason for this is simple, when you choose not to use free software it is a personal choice and you accept the results. When you choose to offer non-free formats you remove the incentive for people to adopt and support less popular free formats. While a free formats is a niche player people will constant feel forced to use them by factors outside of their control. Only through rejecting non-free formats will we see the adoption grow to the point where all people will have the freedom to choose free formats.
and now against working with a company that wants to embrace open source & open standards as best they can.
I think I made my fond wishes for Kaltura clear in my prior message. I'm not against them. I'm against us sending proprietary files out to the public. If the office wants to use proprietary files, great, but what we put out to the public has serious long term implications.
I'm sad that Kaltura is caught in the cross-fire.
I'm also unhappy that Wikimedia has not first given attention and energy into promoting our own users, and existing open external efforts. That isn't Kaltura's fault at all.
I'm unhappy that despite prior discussions, staff is acting like people finding proprietary formats is a surprise.
And yes, you hear me say a lot when I am against something. But it's not because I am some huge ball of negativity, but because if you are doing things I agree with I don't need to say anything at all!
[snip]
I expect that the Foundation will get flak from both camps regularly, both of them making apocalyptic predictions of our future. It's like Wikipedia itself -- as long as it's seen as both a vast right wing conspiracy and a bunch of liberal treehuggers, we're probably doing okay. :-)
The danger here is that "both sides" may still also say you are doing wrong when you are doing wrong. The world does not divide neatly into little binary boxes.