Guillaume Paumier wrote:
I don't think there is an official Board resolution about the use of proprietary technologies on Wikimedia projects. However, Brion and Erik have been known to have a pretty strong opinion on that, and I believe Danese and a large part of the WMF tech staff are in the same place.
A few relevant links for a historical perspective:
- "We should permit Flash video playback" thread on foundation-l in 2007
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.commons/2220/
- "Software policy draft" thread on foundation-l in 2007
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/19547/
- The actual draft:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Draft_Statement_of_Principles_Regar...
There is nothing in that, or in http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_format_policy which suggests that we can't use Flash for microphone audio upload, is there? Are people aware of http://haxe.org/doc/intro and http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ ? The bulk of Flash is no longer proprietary. I know there are patent issues around some flash video formats, but at this point I have little confidence that any of the major browser authors will provide HTML microphone upload in the next five years. Is there any reason to believe otherwise?
Casey Brown wrote:
Another, somewhat more recent one: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/October_3-5,_2008#Open_Standards...
"The board asked Sue to have Mike Godwin revise the draft policy to a version that would make it clear that only free formats are permissible."
Did that ever happen? (Or did anything useful ever come about of it?)
Clearly not, so I am asking Sue and Mike directly by adding them as addressees.
I have been working on microphone audio upload since before the previous decade: http://www.w3.org/TR/device-upload -- I have also offered to donate some nice ActionScript microphone upload code to the Foundation which compiles with Haxe if the builder is willing to do such things as replace the Speex vocodec constant with the equivalent integer. It doesn't run under gnash yet, but I believe it will soon. (I don't think there would be consensus for dropping Wikimedia support for closed-source browsers, as a related matter.)
In return, I have asked the Foundation to spend $2,500 on a contract with Yaron Koren to enable GIFT -- http://microformats.org/wiki/gift -- in the Quiz extension. That would be particularly useful if the efforts to ask the Open University to re-license the several thousand hours of courseware which they currently publish under cc-by-nc-sa, to cc-by-sa or cc-by succeed. I have asked multiple parties, including Board members and the UK Chapter to work on that simultaneously. I believe at least two of them are working on that effort. In any case, GIFT is far more compact and more wikitext-like than the existing Quiz extension to Mediawiki which is bulky and suffers from lack of use in more than 90 assessments on Wikiversity, for example, while GIFT assessments can be produced from the assessments in any Moodle course using Moodle's export function.
However, even though Wayne Mackintosh of the 25,000 teacher-strong WikiEducator and OER Foundation wrote to Erik back on March 28, saying they were "very supportive" of the GIFT compatibility project, Erik has so far hesitated, saying that he wants to see additional support from the community.
So please, if you think GIFT assessment support and/or Flash microphone audio upload is a good idea (and I would repeat that the Spanish Wiktonary still has no audio pronunciation for "hola" even though the English Wiktionary does) then please let Erik know. Thank you!
Sincerely, James Salsman
On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 12:34 AM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Casey Brown wrote:
"The board asked Sue to have Mike Godwin revise the draft policy to a version that would make it clear that only free formats are permissible."
Did that ever happen? (Or did anything useful ever come about of it?)
Clearly not, so I am asking Sue and Mike directly by adding them as addressees.
Mike already responded to that, I guess he's not on the list so it didn't make it through:
On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 8:48 AM, Mike Godwin mgodwin@wikimedia.org wrote:
I drafted a policy on October 6, 2008, and gave it to the Board. Not sure whether they ultimately approved it.
--Mike
On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 12:34 AM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
There is nothing in that, or in http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_format_policy which suggests that we can't use Flash for microphone audio upload, is there?
Sure it does. "Full participation in projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation should not require the use of any proprietary software on the user's system." If microphone upload only works via proprietary software, it contradicts the draft proposal (although that was never actually adopted).
Are people aware of http://haxe.org/doc/intro and http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ ? The bulk of Flash is no longer proprietary.
If the specific implementation can be demonstrated to work reliably with an open-source Flash implementation, that would be another story.
I know there are patent issues around some flash video formats, but at this point I have little confidence that any of the major browser authors will provide HTML microphone upload in the next five years. Is there any reason to believe otherwise?
Yes. Ian Hickson added a <device> element to the HTML5 draft within the last year, and one of its goals is to enable input from microphones/webcams/etc.:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/commands.html#de...
Almost all if not all major browser vendors have expressed interest in implementing it. In fact, after video and animation, microphone/webcam input is the most commonly cited use of Flash, and a leading goal of HTML5 is to replace Flash. I think it's extremely likely that at least one browser will implement some form of microphone input within the next five years. I think it's fairly likely to happen within the next two years.
Recall that <video> was first implemented in November 2007 by Opera. It's now supported by the newest version of every major browser, less than three years later. Browser implementers will implement things very quickly when they get around to it -- they just have bigger use-cases to handle right now than microphone input, like polishing up <video> so it's actually better than Flash. When that's done, audio/video input will likely come up on everyone's agendas and be solved within a couple of years.
(I don't think there would be consensus for dropping Wikimedia support for closed-source browsers, as a related matter.)
It's fine to support closed-source software, as long as open-source software is supported to the same degree. It is not fine to have some features of Wikipedia work properly only if you install proprietary software, unless there's really no other option. If we want direct microphone input, and the only way to do this right now is Flash, and it's impossible to get it working in Gnash, and it's not practical for Wikimedia to fund whatever work is needed to get Gnash to support the features properly -- then there'd maybe be a case for supporting only Flash here, until a free alternative is available. I doubt that all this is the case, though.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org