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

[Kat Walsh]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> My understanding, from a previous mailing list discussion, was that we can
> and hopefully will support Flash video. As long as the encoder license
> fees are reasonable in proportion to our other operational costs, adding
> proprietary video formats alongside free ones can only increase the
> dissemination of knowledge and assist in our educational mission.

This wasn't my understanding. What I'd seen was that even considering
it was dependent on a lot of "if"s, licensing fees not being the most
important of them.

Existing practice (and unwritten policy) is not to use any file
formats that are not free. The resolution as proposed
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_format_policy> was intended to
set down more explicitly what that means as well as to provide the
rationale, precisely so it would be easy to resolve the questions of
what formats should be accepted. (Comments and revisions from the
community would still be welcomed through the week.)

I could write a new argument for it but instead I'll copy the message
I wrote to the board list when the resolution was proposed:

----

I'd say without thinking I go too far
out on a limb that we all think having thriving and universally usable
free formats is a state of the world we should support. So from there
-- viable free formats are necessary to ensure the continued ability
of individuals to freely create and distribute free content. And
allowing individuals to freely create and distribute free content is a
core goal of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Given that, my strong preference is against parallel distribution. Not
because I don't agree that we should reach more people, but because
it's sacrificing a long-term goal for a short-term  benefit. And
because of that I do not agree that we are obligated to maximize
short-term reach. We are obligated to do that which best fulfills our
mission of providing -- and continuing to be able to provide -- free
educational content.

[The message this was in reply to says] that the only reason not to is
because we
value free formats for their own sake over a wider reach, but this is
incorrect. If the free formats are not used by anyone, they die. When
you say that the free formats are not as good and that we need to
provide others to reach people, you're effectively saying that there's
no truly free format, that it is not thriving, that there is some real
or perceived cost to using the free format which prevents people from
using it. You're saying implicitly that because there is no
broadly-adopted free format, there exists a need for one.

The proprietary formats are not fundamentally easier to use than the
free formats, but the users have already installed whatever it is they
need to install to view the proprietary content from other websites,
and so without incentive to do otherwise, they will take the easiest
route and use the format they know and already use. Huge network
effects apply in format adoption -- people use a format because other
people are using it. To whoever has, more shall be given... unless
there is some sort of powerful force bringing change.

These other formats aren't free, and they may restrict the ability to
freely create content in the future. (There are, currently, no free
creation toolsets for Flash.) For many there are no licensing fees or
broad restrictions on use now. But by establishing and enabling
dependence on these formats, we cripple our ability to reject those
terms when this changes. Licensing terms for proprietary formats have
customarily been priced as high as licensees are willing to bear
before it's a better deal to incur the costs of switching to a
different format.

The other media providers are, with rare exception, not providing the
free formats. (Many of them have made deals that explicitly involve
refusing to distribute media in certain free formats in exchange for a
better deal on the formats they do provide, in fact.) Without a body
of work already in the free format to encourage people to use it, and
to have the codecs installed, no one else will use it either.

[...] One of Nokia's points [regarding video standards in HTML5]
was that Theora was irrelevant, as nobody uses it. Those writing
contrary positions cited WMF's use and said no, it is in use, and in
fact there's a top-10 site that only uses Theora, and for the same
reasons that it's being proposed as a web standard. Without
Wikimedia's use, this statement would have been much less powerful.

I do think that in support of this we should make it as easy as
possible to use the free formats. Our media help pages currently give
good guidance on this, and things like the WikiMediaPlayer
(OggHandler) have made the free formats usable for most who visit
without any additional effort on their part. And most users really
don't care which format it is as long as it plays. The free formats
are not harder to use. (At least, no harder to use than anything else
that requires installation -- such as RealPlayer or Flash plugins.)
They don't require technical expertise. They don't require users to
know or care about free software and open standards. They're just less
popular.

But if we compromise this goal -- and I think we can agree that having
a thriving free format for all media types is a goal -- we drastically
lower the chances of anyone else being able to bring it about without
us. We shouldn't act in a way that hurts the future our mission is
supposed to bring about.
----

Apart from some flowery writing I might like to edit, this is still my position.

-Kat

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