[Foundation-l] We should permit Flash video playback

[Kat Walsh]

On 7/20/07, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Nobody is suggesting delivering content exclusively in a patent-encumbered
> format. The proposal is to deliver content in either Ogg Theora or FLV as
> the client requires. Converting a video into a non-free format does not
> make the video non-free. The transparent copy will still be available --
> the Ogg Theora source file.
>
> We support Internet Explorer for browsing our website -- we have
> IE70Fixes.css, for instance. Are you saying that to be truly free, we
> should delete this file and deny access for anyone using Internet Explorer?

This is a bad analogy.

The site is equally accessible from pretty much any browser -- free,
non-free, requiring the blood of your first-born child to operate,
whatever -- and though certain things may be a bit wonky across
different ones, the idea is that no matter how you choose to access
the site it doesn't matter and we're not imposing one solution on you,
though we may fix things that don't look right in your non-free
browser, too.

A proprietary file format requires that you have a player that plays
by their rules; you can use a player that is suitably blessed and only
one of those, or risk legal and financial consequences.

But say you will distribute in both the Flash and ogg theora video
formats. (Ignoring that in other cases where people say they will do
this, they are notoriously bad about providing an up-to-date,
comparable-quality version in the free format, let's assume we do this
right.)

So, great, you can edit the theora version with only free tools, but
then you can't update the Flash version; you're dependent on someone
willing to play by their rules to do so.

And you're not encouraging anyone to adopt the free solution, no
matter how easy it is to do. (Playing the theora videos is dead easy
now, even on Windows.) You're not encouraging other people to make the
free solution any easier, because users have no incentive to use it if
they can simply use what they already have (even if Flash, too,
required jumping through some installation hoops at some point).
You're just continuing to encourage people not to adopt the free
solution if they haven't already.

> Or to make another analogy, why didn't anyone complain about non-free
> software when we made the text of Wikipedia available for download in
> TomeRaider format? Was that a mistake? Now that I have drawn attention to
> it, should we delete it from our servers and then burn the hard drives
> that held it in a purification ritual?
>
> We are supporting free software by fully supporting a complete free
> software stack in the client, and by using free software in the server. It
> would not help our mission to support free software in this third way --
> by boycotting non-free client systems.

I disagree with you. We want to present free content that is freely
reusable. You cannot freely reuse something you cannot edit with free
tools.

As for TomeRaider -- I don't remember hearing we were doing that, so,
a question: is it possible to make a non patent-encumbered free
software tool to read and edit works in the TomeRaider format? If so,
fine; that it can be read by proprietary software also, and even
preferred by users of proprietary software, isn't a problem. But if
not and a free tool for it is impossible, that is a problem, and we
should not use our resources to support it.

-Kat

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