[Foundation-l] Two tests for the freeness of activities related to project content

[Todd Allen]

On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 2:16 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Gerard Meijssen
> <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hoi,
>> Milos who do you want to kid ? A new computer with all the trimmings is able
>> to have multiple pieces of software open at the same time, it is able to
>> listen to music, have muliple applications running that contact the Internet
>> and it still performs really well. An old computer may be able to run
>> Firefox or Open Office and it does work on Windows XP or Linux  in the same
>> way.
>>
>> The key point is that there are two demographics and they should not be
>> mixed to make a believable argument.
>
> A laptop old 4 years is able to run ~100 tabs of Firefox 3 (separated
> in windows, of course), OpenOffice2.x and play music. When we meet, I
> may demonstrate it to you. (Of course, on GNU/Linux.)
>
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I believe that all of this takes away from the core point that Milos
has made, however, this being that our goal is not "free of charge to
read". It is, instead, the goal of freedom to copy, modify, and/or
redistribute content without encumbrances of requesting permission or
having to use nonfree software. I think the "principled author" test
is an excellent one to determine if a given distribution mechanism
meets that goal. In the case of Flash, it clearly does not.

We also should recall that Wikimedia is not exactly a bit player. If
we distribute media in the Ogg/Theora formats, and provide a "Can't
play this file? Click here" link next to them, we will be enabling and
promoting the use of these formats, as a user who installs the
appropriate software for those formats can now view them anywhere, not
just on Wikimedia projects. Given Wikimedia's size and popularity,
that impact would be substantial. We should be supporting free
software and formats, not undermining them just because a nonfree
format might be more popular.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.