[Foundation-l] The problem with Flash

[Ben McIlwain]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Well given that as, from your point of view, this issue raises its ugly head
> yet again, it cannot be said that the community has reached consensus on
> this issue. There are people that do not share your opinion and are not
> afraid to say so. There are good arguments against the use of apparently not
> everybody bought into your ideas or weighs them and comes to a different
> conclusion.
> 
> There is one thing you should consider, MediaWiki is not only used for
> educational purposes by the Wikimedia Foundation. There is a lot of great
> educational material available in Flash. This is a really strong argument
> when you use MediaWiki in an educational setting.

The beautiful thing about MediaWiki is that since it is open source free
software, ANYONE is free to add support for Flash if they wish.  And
they already have.  There are MediaWiki plugins out there that use with
Flash.  So what exactly are you asking that we do, if it is already
done?  We should be focusing all of our effort on completely Free
endeavors; if non-free applications, such as Flash, are useful to other
people, well then they can do it themselves - and they have!

This is, of course, one of the huge strong points of free software that
proprietary systems like Flash cannot ever hope to achieve.  If you want
to do something in Flash, Adobe has to have created it themselves.  If
you want to do something in MediaWiki (such as adding Flash support),
you can simply do it yourself.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFHk7+EvCEYTv+mBWcRAviKAJ92Tg45cgw6OdLMBl3Tm3EUwewlJwCeKoEI
41rFNDk74MpObYh17s2jRsk=
=lKxJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----