Hoi, Nobody is saying that we should use it now. Everybody says that the situation with Flash is not good. Nobody holds their breath until Adobe releases its patents. But this whole situation is out of proportion, it is not what open source is about. When people wanted file server support they started the Samba http://us3.samba.org/samba/ project.
When you ask yourself why the WMF asks for people interested to cooperate, there are a cluster of reasons to be considered. A tool like this has educational merit. Wikieduacator, an organisation we are associated with, shows an interest. It does not cost us anything, but it has the potential of providing improved tooling.
When you ask yourself why would YOU collaborate or not collaborate it makes sense to ask if you consider it worth your time. You can discuss it on the mailing list and if the arguments are good for you by all means they are good enough to make up your mind.
All the technical reasons why you might want to lend a hand have NO bearing on why the WMF informs you about this opportunity. They do it for their own reasons. In essence, it has nothing to do with you. When the comparison was made with religion, you have to appreciate that those who believe are ferociously against those who do not hold the true faith. This behaviour is what I observe and from my point of view it is not pretty. This has led to diminished value of this, the foundation-l, because Mike decided that the tone of voice was too much even unacceptable. As a consequence we all suffer a loss because the distance between the foundation and the people of the community has grown wider.
So, you are doing good in adding "vaporware" to what is already insulting as it is. When you consider this freedom of speech, you may wonder why some people are not willing to communicate with you or do not consider your opinions. Thanks, GerardM
On Jan 20, 2008 7:05 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
No, I think he's pointing out the issues with this that state why we shouldn't use it now; this has agreement, I believe. Not to mention, until Adobe releases those patents or makes Flash an open standard, there will never be a 100% (that's gratis AND libre) implementation of it, ever, as Ben said.
However, the question still remains: why is it the WMF's job to provide a PR boost for a (seemingly) startup? Wouldn't we get further by helping Gnash directly?
Somebody knows somebody, that much appears clear to me now.
Chad
On Jan 20, 2008 12:47 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Nice but what is your point and how does it relate to what is the issue?
The
issue is that a framework is being developed. It needs open source components to make it work and gnash has been mentioned as one component
in
all this that needs work. What you describe is exactly the reason why
work
needs to be done to make this type of content work well on Linux
So you describe that things do not work well. You provide the exact arguments why something needs to be done ... So you are in favour of the proposed collabaration... GREAT Thanks, GerardM
On Jan 20, 2008 6:32 PM, Ben McIlwain cydeweys@gmail.com wrote:
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Brion Vibber wrote:
In many cases that'll cover the same ground as non-free formats; the main exceptions are for patent-encumbered standards (eg, the MPEG
family
- MP3, AAC, H.264, etc) and widely-deployed proprietary formats that
have been reverse-engineered by FOSS developers (eg, Flash).
On the subject of Flash, I think it might help to relate my
experiences
so that everyone on this list knows how deficient it is on free
software
platforms. (This isn't directed to you Brion, as that'd just be preaching to the choir :-P )
I run GNU/Linux on my laptop. Pretty much everything works and I'm
able
to do everything I do in Windows, except Flash. First of all, the
free
software Flash alternatives simply aren't there yet. They aren't good enough for everyday use. And even if they were, they still wouldn't
be
free, because they're infringing on various patents that Adobe no
doubt
holds. And the free software stuff isn't good enough to create Flash either, so you still need to pay the tax in the form of the creator program (which as far as I know doesn't run on GNU/Linux). You can
see
why this is unacceptable.
Even the official Adobe Flash player plugin for Mozilla Firefox on GNU/Linux is deficient. It's treated like a third-rate product by Adobe, sometimes seeing major version updates many months after the Windows plugin is released. In the mean time, new Flash content that depends on the new features simply won't work. And the plugin itself
is
just bad. It frequently crashes Firefox, some of its functionality plain old doesn't work, etc. And nevermind that it's not free in any sense of the word except gratis; it's all binary, the source isn't available, so it's all entirely anti-libre.
- From where I stand, Flash isn't even an option to be considered in
fulfilling the Foundation's mission statement of "developing
educational
content under a free license or in the public domain". It won't even run on a completely free system, and it will only run poorly on a partially free system (giving in and installing their binary-only plugin). It is, simply, not what we are looking for. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (MingW32)
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