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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 5:19 PM, Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org> wrote:
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> David Gerard wrote:
>> 2008/10/3 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Also, I may see that Erik Zachte made good dynamic statistics without
>>> using Flash (and without SVG, as far as I understand).
>>
>>
>> The <canvas> element of HTML5, in Firefox. That's what all the cool
>> browsers are doing these days.
>
> Which was my example of a preferred target technology. :)

Right.
I wouldn't be opposed to using flash to run a drop-in <canvas>
emulator (providing the emulator flash file itself was free software)
for features where the rest of the code is regular old JS which ran
without flash on modern browsers.

The important distinction currently between a flash video player and a
<canvas> emulator is that the canvas emulator would be an option open
to everyone at no cost while a flash video player currently requires
codecs that require licensing due to patents. (For the codecs fees
must be paid for encoders, decoders, and for usage of the encoded
files).

So even if the use of the canvas emulator misses an opportunity to
encourage people to install a <canvas> supporting browser that does
not costs anyone their freedom or leaving anyone feeling forced to
spend money. Any website could throw up the same JS code that uses the
native HTML or free softwareFlash Canvas and pay fees to no one and be
at no risk of litigation.

Those sorts of usage usually don't create any additional accessibility
problems, nor create any materil security problems.

So yea, I agree that there could be possibly reasonable uses of Flash,
which was exactly why I singled out flash video in my initial post in
this thread.  Such uses, which run afoul of no patents nor involve any
proprietary-only features wouldn't be prohibited by the proposed file
format resolution (as members of the subset of flash files which are
not proprietary nor require unavailable codec patents). Sadly, Video
is not currently one of them but it's the use of Flash everyone but
Brion thinks of. ;)

Though I do wonder how many of the other uses would ever happen and
how many are just idle speculation:  For example we've had a Java bulk
uploader (commonist) for *years* which could be web-started with
nearly zero effort (throw the jar onto upload, and the rest could be
done from sitejs) and make bulk uploading much easier. ... Yet, it
hasn't been done.