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

[Tim Starling]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> "The cost is $X, but if we don't pay it,  then Y% will suddenly be
> unable to play our video!"

I don't think that's a problem. We can give the users plenty of warning,
and by that time, the client software will be more mature. Theora will be
supported in Firefox, and the free clients will be more stable. I don't
see Theora losing ground in that time.

[...]
> Tim, I know I'm getting repetitive here, but if there were no lock-in
> you wouldn't be suggesting flash as a display format at all.  You're
> not suggesting that it would further our mission to adopt parallel
> articles in DOCX, etc.   It's the very fact that there is lock-in
> which leaves us stuck with these problems.

I'm suggesting Flash because I believe that education, not promotion of
free software, should be our goal. We should only support free software as
far as it supports that goal. As a community, we believe that free
software supports our goal a great deal, and that we should use it
everywhere where it is practical.

Various organisations have distributed Wikipedia text in non-free formats,
and I hope we continue to encourage that.

> Increased adoption is the only way to avoid that lock-in.

It's not lock-in if we pay the same price now, by excluding people without
Theora players, as we would pay in the future, by excluding those same
people.

You argue that we would have to exclude more people in the future, as a
consequence of Theora losing ground compared to where it is now. I think
you are overestimating this effect.

[...]
> 
>> Maybe by that
>> time, the Thusnelda branch will be finished, and we'll have an codec
>> library which is competitive with H.264 in terms of output quality.
> 
> Do you actually think the difference in quality per bitrate between
> the current Theora encoder and H.264 has any relevance to us?

Not directly, but technical parity might help to convince vendors to
support it.

[...]
> If we want to be serious about delivering good video support the
> current lack of client-side Theora support is not one of the largest
> barriers.  There are many other important features that we lack which
> are true for any format, and which are difficult to solve.

Granted. But on principle, I don't want the lack of support for commercial
client software to be written into our bylaws.

-- Tim Starling