2009/6/7 Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu>du>:
I think there are two issues for a proprietary ->
non-proprietary converter:
1. The conversion software itself must be FLOSS.
2. The format being converted must have an open specification (Flash being a
good example of one that might be allowed to be converted).
The first is easy: ffmpeg. It converts pretty much anything to pretty
much anything. This is what I mean when I say that the technical side
of such a thing would verge on the trivial. (Modulo a sufficiently
CPU-endowed box for transcoding.)
The second - if ffmpeg have worked out the format, it's hardly any
sort of secret any more.
I think it's something that would be worth doing to get more
educational material into free formats and in a repository (Commons)
that could spread them to the world, even if they did start in an
encumbered format.
- d.