Gregory Maxwell wrote:
There is the simple fact that Kaltura is flash based, which the Foundation should have well known to establish as a deal breaker form day one, since that has been the outcome of all previous discussions on the matter. Though that isn't really much of a criticism of Kaltura itself, though it's a solid reason why it should not be used on Wikimedia sites.
When I was asked for feedback on a potential agreement to look at Kaltura's video editor thing, I pointed out that a purely Flash-based tool would never be acceptable to us.
1) Adobe Flash supports *only* patent-encumbered video and audio formats (eg MP3, FLV, H.264), and *no* royalty-free formats (eg Vorbis, Theora). As a matter of policy we can't require people to use patent-encumbered formats, and it remains a matter of debate whether we wish to (or can) use automated transcoding to provide both patent-free and patented formats.
2) Adobe Flash itself is non-free software, so we can't as a matter of policy require people to have it to access things on the site.
3) Free alternatives (Gnash etc) are still playing catch-up; at a minimum, any Flash tool we support *must* work with the current version of Gnash.
This cleanly nixed any kind of agreement with them where we might look at their tool as it stands today.
As a result, the requirement for compatibility with Ogg Theora and Gnash was made. Since their software isn't anywhere *near* that level of compatibility, we have no interest at all in it today.
If and when they reach it, we'll be happy to take a look at it, and we're happy to encourage them to reach that goal.
That's our only obligation.
Now, the issue of dual formats (patented and patent-free formats side-by-side as compatibility alternates) remains open. There have been discussions at the board level, which as far as I know have yet to reach a conclusion.
What we can say for sure is that if a firm decision is made to forbid even compatibility-alternate use of patented formats, this would nix our ability to even consider a Flash/Gnash-based video tool.
A tool which supported *only* Vorbis/Theora on Gnash would not work on Adobe Flash, which would make it useless for what, 99.9% of the web population?
If the decision is made to allow patented and patent-free formats to sit side by side as compatiblity alternates, then we might still be interested in Flash-based tools, as we could support both Adobe Flash and free Gnash (which as it improves is likely to be more often supported out of the box on various Linux distros).
Of course Flash remains a proprietary format; the open authoring tools have required reverse-engineering the format and opcodes. There's no standardization, no official specs or compatibility profiles. We can expect Adobe to keep adding in more proprietary things, and the free tools can continue to play catch-up.
So we still have to look at Flash suspciously as a matter of trade-offs. The good thing is that it has some nice capabilities and it's *very* widely installed. The bad is that it's not an open standard, free alternatives are still limited, and we have the patent issues on video and audio codecs used.
So we certainly have no intention of abandoning other projects. We're supporting MetaVid with SVN hosting already, and we'll be happy to do what we can for anybody else working on awesome things.
*Especially* awesome things built on open standards and patent-free codecs.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)