Ben McIlwain wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
[...]
You don't need permission. At most you need a patent license, but MPEG LA don't charge for noncommercial use of open source encoders, and they don't charge for "free internet broadcast" either.
Since when has non-commercial ever been good enough for Wikipedia? Non-commercial restrictions go fundamentally against the nature of free content. What good is it if we can do the transcoding because we're non-commercial, but most of our mirrors can't? Using proprietary formats puts all sorts of restrictions and limitations on how our content can be used by others, and that is unacceptable.
It's not the content that has a non-commercial restriction, it's the encoder license. It's a different thing. Our mirrors can serve content in Ogg Theora format if that's what they want to do. It's not a restriction to add support for another client, it's the removal of a restriction.
-- Tim Starling