[Foundation-l] File format policy

[Florence Devouard]

Brianna Laugher wrote:
> On 20/01/2008, Florence Devouard <anthere at anthere.org> wrote:
>> Resolution:File format policy
>>
>> Whereas an essential part of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission is
>> encouraging the development of free-content educational resources that
>> may be created, used, and reused by a diverse community, without
>> restriction, and because we believe that this mission requires thriving
>> open formats and open standards on the web to allow the creation of
>> content not subject to restrictions on creation, use, and reuse, it is
>> resolved that all material, text , multimedia, or software, on Wikimedia
>> Foundation projects must be in a format that is:
> [...]
>> 5. Not encrypted or otherwise subject to technical protection measures
>> incompatible with the permissions of free content licensing.
> 
> Is this the anti-DRM clause? I think so, but I just want to confirm.
> 
> Is it right to include "software" in relation to this? Does it mean
> software that runs on our servers? (Because the projects don't really
> host software, except for mediawiki.)
> 
> cheers,
> Brianna


That might change in the future though.

I have posted a version on meta

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_format_policy#Reworked:File_format_policy

I strengthened the definition, to clarify that this applied to wikimedia 
projects in their public definition; but did not include necessarily all 
of our wikis or generally, all software used by the organization.

Rationale is that whilst it seems reasonable to request that Wikipedia, 
Wikinews, Wikiversity etc... be extremely respectful to that policy 
since we want our resources to be reuseable without restriction... it 
does not seem so necessary to make an obligation to use only free 
format, free software and so on in our daily activity.

To be SUPER practical, some of us still use powerpoint to make 
presentations ("cause the free equivalent for mac is a pain in the 
a...), we still sometimes use Word to share text with business partners, 
  we even use macintosh with mac OS rather than Linux :-)
Afaik, the accountant is not (yet ?) using open source accounting 
software, toolserver appears to host non free software etc...

In short, in the first case, it should be a "requirement", whilst in the 
second case, it should be a "recommandation or guideline".

For this reason, I think both cases should be the object of two separate 
resolutions.

Ant