I agree that making content available on free systems is a Good Thing, but before we go down the path banning all encumbered formats, I'd like to ask if there is an accessible middle ground.
Many unfree file formats are poorly supported on Linux and associated free software systems; however, it is also true that many free file formats are poorly supported on Windows and similar unfree systems. For example, one may have to install additional readers/converters/etc. to use OGG and related formats on Windows that aren't available by default. That is not an insurmountable barrier, but it is a barrier, especially to those people with limited technical skills. In addition, there are many situations, such as libraries and public school computers, where the user is not allowed to install any software at all.
I also suspect that there are many people of the YouTube Generation, for example, that would be happy to make their content free, but only really know how to work with MPEGs.
Rather than have Wikimedia say "X format is unfree, therefore X is forbidden", I would much rather see: "X format is unfree, therefore Mediawiki will automatically translate it into these free formats, and provide all users with several options for which format they can most easily use."
Obviously Mediawiki doesn't yet have facilities for format conversion, but in general I think that is a superior goal to simply saying that unfree formats are forbidden. The legitimacy and technical feasibility of performing such conversions may depend on the details of why a specific format is unfree in the first place, and that is something that will probably have to be looked at on a format by format basis. However, whenever possible, I would prefer to increase accessibility to Wikipedia by supporting (and converting) the formats actually in use, rather than erecting barriers to participation.
If the same content could be made available in both a widely-used proprietary format and poorly used open source format, would anyone object, in principle, to using Wikimedia facilities to convert between the two and then distributing both? I'd much rather we work to improve accessibility by making formats interoperable (whenever possible) rather than simply banning all formats that aren't fully free.
-Robert A. Rohde
On Jan 20, 2008 1:50 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
Many unfree file formats are poorly supported on Linux and associated free software systems; however, it is also true that many free file formats are poorly supported on Windows and similar unfree systems.
In fact, it has historically been the case that many free formats have been supported worse on popular "Linux" systems than non-free formats! Although in the last year it has gotten a lot better.
This may seem odd, but its not: A typical "Linux" desktop is chock-full of non-free software, or quasi-free software which support non-free formats by ignoring patents and being too uninteresting for legal action.
Some vendors of Gnu/Linux software directly include non-free software, others will include software which is free outside of the United States, but not inside because of patent restrictions, and in many cases users just install the software they need from repositories on the internet. (http://rpm.livna.org/rlowiki/ for example)
The viability of free formats has almost nothing to do with what type of software (free or proprietary) users have on their own systems, it has everything to do with adoption and popularity.
For example, I considered it a major victory last year when I convinced the mplayer developers to include Theora support in their default build! It really is false to paint this is a free-software user vs proprietary software user issue.
Free formats can be implemented by proprietary systems just fine and frequently are. In the case of multimedia codecs, the Ogg codecs are all BSDish licensed, and have already been shipped by major proprietary software vendors (Microsoft for example) for some applications.
For example, one may have to install additional readers/converters/etc. to use OGG and related formats on Windows that aren't available by default. That is not an insurmountable barrier, but it is a barrier, especially to those people with limited technical skills. In addition, there are many situations, such as libraries and public school computers, where the user is not allowed to install any software at all.
I think we should treat readers and encoders distinctly, and I'll go into that below.
As far as software-install for reading goes, If the user has Java installed we provide a zero-install java applet player for both audio and video.
True, not everyone has Java installed, but the adoption of it is still pretty good (the success numbers I had from the popup player were fairly high). (... incidentally, it works on the kiosk machines the public libraries here :) )
Can someone tell me if Windows Vista finally includes a current generation version of Flash? (Don't answer unless you are sitting at a fresh install viewing your first webpage or are otherwise absolutely sure, ... in the past many people claimed 9x did simply because someone else installed it or they forgot)
In recent history almost all web video playback has required an install on Windows. So then that really reduces to an issue of one install or two, and what people already have installed. If they are already installing making an argument for an additional or a different install is a much smaller battle.
I also suspect that there are many people of the YouTube Generation, for example, that would be happy to make their content free, but only really know how to work with MPEGs.
Youtube supports upload in dozens of formats, and they transcode to FLV. We can too. I would support that.
There are also a number of popular formats which are (probably) mostly-free but are completely unsuitable for web distribution. For example, a lot of cameras record video as MJPEG-in-avi. Until this year that has been the most common recording format for still cameras that also support video. (This year it will likely become H264) Accepting those for upload would be very nice.
Rather than have Wikimedia say "X format is unfree, therefore X is forbidden", I would much rather see: "X format is unfree, therefore Mediawiki will automatically translate it into these free formats, and provide all users with several options for which format they can most easily use."
Lets split this issue.
Should we allow lots of upload formats and be able to transcode? There was a GSOC project to provide transcoding to Mediawiki, but I don't know if it got anywhere. I think this is a reasonable compromise, it makes a lot of sense.
Should we send user files in clearly non-free formats? I think it would be very harmful to begin doing that, even as an option, and even presuming we get it right and don't end up with the less popular format always being broken.
I've explained in other posts, but I'll do again here so people that don't want to wade through my verbal-vomit elsewhere don't have to:
In cases where the a free format is very popular and well supported, JPG, and HTML for example no one is here suggesting we use proprietary alternatives. But for formats that are less popular, like Ogg/Vorbis, we hear occasional requests "Won't you also offer AAC?"
This is because an unpopular free format is not, yet, actually free: It has a cost. The cost is that if you want to distribute in that format, all your friends and family will have to be free-software geeks. Other people will suffer some inconvenience to use it. The tools will be less common and harder to find. Minting more free-software geeks is nice, but it is not our mission.
So we have a cycle: Users don't use the free format because their software doesn't offer it; Their software doesn't offer it because the users don't demand it; The users don't demand it because their friends/contacts are only giving them the competing proprietary files... There is a strong network effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect) at play.
There is a one time cost to break the cycle. This cost takes the form of education, promotion, and sometimes a little development. The rights-holders of proprietary formats are well aware of the costs: When Vorbis was released MP3 licensing became a fraction of its prior cost, and the price is constantly adjusted to keep the sort term cost of using the proprietary formats cheaper than driving adoption of a free format.
(Although some recent submarine patent lawsuits against MPEG licensees have thrown that balancing act out of wack and we're seeing a recent upswing in interest in unencumbered formats)
Once that cost is paid, once people are convinced to support the format in their applications, once users adopt it... The cost is gone, and no one bothers pushing a proprietary format because a proprietary format simply can not compete with the low cost, flexibility, and resulting ubiquity of a well adopted free format.
In order to understand why this matters to us you have to stop thinking in terms of "Can someone on a free software system read the file?" ... Forget that... We're not the FSF, and while the adoption of Free Software is important there is an issue here far more directly related to our mission:
Can people freely author material in the format, without being forced to pay royalties, use software which denies them freedom, suffer a greatly reduced audience, or accept an addition burden in technical complexity?
Lets imagine that Wikipedia always took the route you propose: You post a freely licensed video on Wikipedia. Wikipedia offers it in a free format as well as many other non-free formats, I download it in the free format. I make some edits. I plan on putting it up on my site.
Now I must choose: Do I use a poorly adopted free format, meaning the only free-software-geeks can view it, do I use a proprietary format with expensive encoders that deny my rights and have per-download fees, do I undertake the difficulty of providing two files while still paying all the costs for the non-free file and knowing few people will view the free one, or do I ask someone else to host the file who will pick up the licensing costs and charge me some in other way?
Freedom does not mean the freedom to choose your master, freedom is the freedom to be your own master.
Wikimedia is in a position to drive free formats without too much cost, and it has already done so.
Five years ago free multimedia formats were something only free-software-geeks could read and write. Today, the majority of viewers to our site can view these files. In a short time span my popup WikiMediaPlayer had successful audio and video playback for well over 1 million distinct IPs from all over the world, likely representing millions of people. Soon, mainstream browsers with built in free multimedia format support will be shipping.
Wikimedia's exclusive use of free formats in the past has been instrumental in getting things this far, and it will be instrumental in crossing the finish line in the not so distant future. When free media formats are as widely adopted as HTML and JPG, I won't have any more reason to protest offering proprietary media formats, but you'll have no good reason to ask for them either.
As an educational non-profit we can tolerate the short term costs in order to obtain the long term benefits, and as a top ten website these costs are low. Besides, we've already paid the cost of exclusively using free formats for many years. It would be foolish to stop now when the media formats issue is closer to resolved than it ever has been before.
Success in Wikimedia's mission *requires* the existence of free formats, not merely "free for us and terribly inconvenient for everyone else", but formats which are free for *everyone*.
Not just free to look but not touch, but authoring, distribution, etc. ... The formats need to be as free as the content they contain, otherwise the content isn't as free as we claim it to be.
[snip]
If the same content could be made available in both a widely-used proprietary format and poorly used open source format, would anyone object, in principle, to using Wikimedia facilities to convert between the two and then distributing both?
Yes. It's not like the idea of distributing both is new or revolutionary. But it's expensive to do, hard to get right, and doesn't result in fulfilling the mission over the long term.
In the case of accepting many formats, I think that makes sense: There is little need for us to drive authoring in free formats today, because authoring isn't the limiting factor in the usability of free formats. Client support is. Once client support is common the advantages of free formats will make them ubiquitous, and the authoring tools should follow. Since the licensing for proprietary codecs is usually per-coder and per-download-in-that-format WMF could legally read the files without great cost.
On of the things I liked about the resolution Florence posted was that it talked about what Wikimedia distributes on the sites, not what people submit to us. I think thats the right emphasis today.
On 1/20/08, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
As an educational non-profit we can tolerate the short term costs in order to obtain the long term benefits, and as a top ten website these costs are low.
Therein lies the rub -- is the cost low or not? It's worth noting that video on the web was viable for millions of users long before YouTube -- the YouTube success story is not one of bandwidth, but of usability. Before Flash players became widespread, playing video on the web was a constant hassle: one would struggle with Real Player, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, etc., and an additional number of specialized plugins, all of course proprietary.
Whether one believe's Adobe's numbers of 98%+ adoption of Flash in "mature markets" (as opposed to 84.6% for Java) [1], YouTube and its clones made it ridiculously easy for millions of people to view video on the web who couldn't before. The fact that terabytes of video based educational content have become readily available as a result is an unquestionably good thing.
My fear is that by locking ourselves into Ogg Theora only, we are replicating the pre-YouTube experience of video that may or may not work, may or may not require installation of additional plugins, etc. Even on my fast Ubuntu system, the Java player takes about 10 seconds to first initialize, which is frankly painful. I suspect that the only effect a completely purist stance will have is simply that people will go elsewhere for video educational content. One should not confuse Wikipedia's power as a text-based medium with a universal lever that we can use to get anything that we want.
If Ogg Theora is the future, then choosing parallel distribution now on a site that is not a significant source of video educational content will have no negative impact. And if it isn't, then surely, inconveniencing the people trying to access the little video educational content that we have is not the way to change that. Without easy & immediate playback ability on the vast majority of systems, it seems unlikely to me that we'll ever grow into a significant repository of user-contributed video educational resources in the first place.
My worst case scenario is that in the belief of doing something good for the world -- trying to lead towards greater freedom in distribution and authoring of content -- we'll actually achieve the opposite: lead people to repositories and archives that are much less principled and whose operators would never even conceive having a debate like this one.
That doesn't mean that I believe the case for parallel distribution is unassailable. I do believe, however, that mandating a Foundation rule against it would be premature.
[1] http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/
On 21/01/2008, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
My worst case scenario is that in the belief of doing something good for the world -- trying to lead towards greater freedom in distribution and authoring of content -- we'll actually achieve the opposite: lead people to repositories and archives that are much less principled and whose operators would never even conceive having a debate like this one.
Generally the "we should do something evil to stop someone else doing that thing first" argument is rejected outside the context of unilateral nuclear strikes.
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