[Foundation-l] Freedom, standards, and file formats

[Jrapido]

I do not understand why the file format rule
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_format_policy was not made months
ago when it was put online.

When Anthere put it online it was clear to all with open eyes that it
is already the way of our project and that it must stay to keep our
project free.

The only argument come from staff of wikimedia. When they move to San
Francisco most expensive city in the world they said they would
partner with similar minded organizations.  I wonder then how there
can be similar minds in a place so different to most of the editors.
I see now: similar minds speaks of people who exploit the public like
youtube, "myspace" and kaltura.

Now Anthere is gone and the rule is still not approved.  Frieda is
gone.  There will be no rule to prevent the staff from abusing my work
to take my freedom to make themselves more powerful and wealthy.  The
community no longer have a voice.  With wikimedia new San Francisco
USA mind they seem to not care for the reasons which made Wikipedia
different. Wikipedia is now bigger, better than encyclopedias and many
people write it without being paid but that was never the reason for
Wikipedia.  Wikipedia means freedom of the mind.


On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 5:10 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> As I see that there are a number of well introduced people in this
> matter, I want just to give the input from my experience (I am an
> admin at the company which archives media and doing press clipping).
>
> - For us, Flash was never an option, while WMV, MPEG (1 and 2) and
> OGG/Theora are. Note that the company in which I am working has to
> adapt to their customers. Simply, no one of customers wants Flash.
> (BTW, MPEG 1 and 2 are useful because there are hardware encoders on
> ["hardware"] TV cards. WMV is useful because of the possibility to
> make a very small video file.)
>
> - There are VLC, MPlayer and similar plugins for web browsers which
> allow watching video [from browsers]. It makes usage of OGG/Theora
> format similar to usage of Flash ("click here to download the
> plugin").
>
> - It is already mentioned that HTML5 will have <video> tag and that
> Firefox 3.1 supports it.
>
> From this perspective, I don't see a reason why to adopt Flash *now*.
> It was an option few years ago, but there is no need for that now. If
> some free software is not stable enough now (like VLC or MPlayer
> plugins), it is reasonable to build a solution around that software.
> We will not make anything like that (even Flash based) in the next 6
> or 12 months and until that time free software may be much more
> stable.
>
> BTW, VLC is a really good piece of software (including their streaming
> software VLS). Did anyone think to make contact with them? I am sure
> that it would be possible to work on "the solution for Wikipedia" with
> them.
>
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