2008/9/27 Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net:
To illustrate this with an example, maybe not the best but one that comes up often enough, consider video file formats. (Some of this is beyond my technical expertise, so please forgive any misstatements.) Adobe Flash has widespread adoption to the point of being near-universal. The company has also been moving to make it more open for people watching, distributing, and working on content in this environment. It's close to free, but I understand there are still some issues like patent "encumbrances" around Flash.
And issues about creating flash files. No cost to view more cost to create
Meanwhile, there are pure free software formats that do similar things but have pretty limited adoption.
Depends how you define limited adoption.
This brings up a number of questions. First of all, how important is multimedia content to us in general?
Varies from project to project. Spoken wikipedia appears to get a fair bit of use. Videos are seeing an increasing amount of use.
Considering both the investment to create it and the environment in which it's produced, historically it's a lot less amenable to free licensing. It's still useful, no doubt, but what measures should we take to promote it?
We should use it. In addition a fair bit of encyclopedic video has few issues with free licensing. Videos of animals. Videos of various bits of kit in action.
Back to the two manifestations of freedom I mentioned, how should we balance those? One possibility that's been raised is to allow Flash content so long as we require that it be encoded and distributed in a truly free format as well. Is that sort of approach an acceptable compromise?
No.
It would make it much easier to achieve wide distribution of free content, while still making sure that it's also available completely without restrictions, for those who find that important. Are there situations in which this compromise doesn't work out for some reason? Why? (And none of this has to be limited to the Flash video example, discussion of other formats and standards is welcome.)
There is no way the foundation can legally guarantee trandcodeing to non free formats.
In dealing with the limited adoption of certain free formats, some people have advocated a more evangelistic approach, if you will. Given the reach of Wikipedia in particular, it's suggested that our policy could push wider adoption of these formats. That may be, but the question is, how much is that push worth? What are the prospects for making those formats readable in the average reader's environment, and encouraging wider use as a standard?
Vorbis? about 100% (indeed they probably have software that can play vorbis files although I doubt they know it.
Theoda? Well we know firefox are looking at implementing it as part of a <video> tag. I'd estimate 50%
Dirca? BBC backed for some uses. It isn't going to go away but I can't see it hitting general use for a while
SVG? 100% alreadly largely supported
xcf? Not something most users worry about
Djvu? useful even with low user uptake.
Impress files? They would likely be useful for wikiversity. Use is open office appears to be going up.
Does an uncompromising approach result in significant progress, or would we simply be marginalizing the impact of our work?
At the present time videos and sound do not constitute a significantly large percentage of our work to have a significant impact.
And is it worth the "sacrifice" of the many people who would miss out on some of the knowledge we're sharing, because the free format isn't accessible to them? (That's also partly a problem of disseminating knowledge, of course.)
They are free to install free formats. We deny them nothing. We cannot make the same guarantee with unfree formats
If we adopt a compromise position as described earlier, how much do we lose in terms of promoting the freer formats?
They would end up limited to the people who compile their software from the source code.