On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 12:16 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip]
I'm suggesting Flash because I believe that education, not promotion of free software, should be our goal. We should only support free software as far as it supports that goal. As a community, we believe that free software supports our goal a great deal, and that we should use it everywhere where it is practical.
Where did free software come into this discussion. It's orthogonal, almost entirely so. The formats we use have BSD licensed reference implementations and are supported in a great many pieces of proprietary software.
I very much wish a particular piece of proprietary software, Microsoft Windows, integrated Ogg/Theora support because then I very much think the discussion of flash video would be over. (Microsoft ships Xiph codecs in many other products... so it's less unreasonable than you might guess, though even Adobe ships Ogg/Speex in Flash, but I'm told that Theora has no chance in flash today).
I use proprietary software to convert proprietary formats into ones suitable for Wikipedia. You don't hear me howling that the office uses many Mac (though I did like it when Danny had Ubuntu(?) on his desktop).
I think we're in agreement on the role of free software in Wikimedia But formats are not software. At the time I first setup the Java video player for Wikimedia, Java itself was still fairly proprietary (though I did get the player working in GCJ first). If Flash played free media formats and you were to propose to use flash *only* for that purpose, I would not pose an objection. (though for other purpose, flash has other problems).
Our mission is not merely education, but educational content under free content licenses. This much is clear, unambiguously stated, and not currently up for debate. It's a key differentiation between Wikimedia and hundreds of thousands of other educators.
Those licenses grant rights -- like the ability to create derivatives or verbatim distribution at no cost and without asking for permission -- which are not realistically possible in a world where using a no-cost format means that only computer geeks can view the result, or where you have to republish via a site like Wikimedia who will pay some of the licensing fees for you.
Various organisations have distributed Wikipedia text in non-free formats, and I hope we continue to encourage that.
I'd hope that we'd encourage them to use free formats where at all possible, while still doing whatever good thing they are doing. But they are not us, and what they do is their concern, not ours.
Depending on the exact nature of their non-free formats and their usage that action may be in violation of the licensing: Producing DRM locked enhanced versions is expressly forbidden by both the FDL and by the CC-By-SA family of licenses. I would hope that Wikimedia is wise enough to not encourage any such illegal and arguably unethical activity.
[snip]
You argue that we would have to exclude more people in the future, as a consequence of Theora losing ground compared to where it is now. I think you are overestimating this effect.
It doesn't have to lose ground: Our perspective on costs will change. After a couple years of flash video, do you really think that going back to where we are now would be an equally easy decision than we have now in staying the course?
As Kat's post states: Formats enjoy tremendous network effects. For things with strong network effect we expect logistic or exponential like growth curves: Investing $10 today is not the same as investing $10 ten years from now.
Our video support sucks in a dozen ways unrelated to not offering non-free video. The added cost of telling people to download another codec/player is not huge compared to the other issues. Once that changes the argument will be different. Internet users of today are very accustomed to installing software: If the iPhone is at all predictive, we may simply not have the same opportunities in the future.
I may well be overestimating the effect our use will have in the future, but I know my past expectations were underestimates.
Someone has to pay a cost to get the free formats adopted: What this argument is really fundamentally about is "Shall we take a gamble and try to externalize that cost?"
Of all the large websites we're the least likely to tolerate non-free formats, since we actually see non-freeness itself as a cost. Many other large sites actually gain an advantage from the non-freeness. What does that say about the probability of others picking up that cost if we do not? I do not think it is a good gamble at all.
I don't even think that the cost is all that great: In a frictionless market we would expect the codec prices to singular large organizations (like Wikimedia), or at least co-operating collections (too bad that almost all other big media sites are either MPEG patent holders or in brutal competition with each other) to be roughly comparable to the cost of spurring adoption. I'm not aware of any studies of this, but its easy to see the drop in competing audio codec licensing fees that happened when Ogg/Vorbis went 1.0. It's probably even less for us because the pricing was probably designed for groups with a decreased incompatibility tolerance. ... Though I guess by letting OS vendors pay the decoder fees, and Free Software users/vendors by via legal liability, downstream users by their need to pay royalties, we probably can externalize the majority of the cost associated with a decision to use non-free formats.
... Enough waxing economic.
Do you actually think the difference in quality per bitrate between the current Theora encoder and H.264 has any relevance to us?
Not directly, but technical parity might help to convince vendors to support it.
Perhaps. But do you not think that "Wikipedia requires it?" would not be a much more effective argument (at least for a web-browsing device).
I've talked to hardware makers about format support in the past, and it's all about market size. I really don't think anything else matters at all: Even fees. If H.264 cost $25/device (I think the original licensing needed DVD players were that high), and H.264 is required by the market, they'll simply pass the cost on, since all the major players will be compelled to pay the same fees.
Codec licensing normally has per-company annual caps, so the largest companies with the most ability to cause adoption actually see a competitive advantage vs smaller competition caused by the non-free formats that they have to pay for.
Granted. But on principle, I don't want the lack of support for commercial client software to be written into our bylaws.
Fantastic! because no one has proposed that. Seriously.
Please don't confuse free formats with free software. Freely licensed software needs free formats. Freely licensed content needs free formats. But Freely licensed formats have advantages to even to people who care nothing about either of those two things.
The free codecs we use today have BSD licensed reference implementations (a direct recommendation by RMS, in fact, for the express purpose of encouraging adoption by proprietary software). Free media formats are used in many pieces proprietary software, and shipped by the largest proprietary software vendor in the world (though sadly not with their web browser). Flash includes Speex, mostly likely due to Speex's through domination of a particular market segment.