[Foundation-l] We should permit Flash video playback

[Tim Starling]

Kat Walsh wrote:
> But say you will distribute in both the Flash and ogg theora video
> formats. (Ignoring that in other cases where people say they will do
> this, they are notoriously bad about providing an up-to-date,
> comparable-quality version in the free format, let's assume we do this
> right.)
> 
> So, great, you can edit the theora version with only free tools, but
> then you can't update the Flash version; you're dependent on someone
> willing to play by their rules to do so.

There would be automatic transcoding. We have a summer student working on
this. The file format would not be obvious to a casual reader, it would
just work. The format as seen by the editor would be a free format.

> And you're not encouraging anyone to adopt the free solution, no
> matter how easy it is to do. (Playing the theora videos is dead easy
> now, even on Windows.) You're not encouraging other people to make the
> free solution any easier, because users have no incentive to use it if
> they can simply use what they already have (even if Flash, too,
> required jumping through some installation hoops at some point).
> You're just continuing to encourage people not to adopt the free
> solution if they haven't already.

Right, so you want to encourage people to use free video players by making
the non-free players not work. I think I addressed that point of view in
my original post.

>> Or to make another analogy, why didn't anyone complain about non-free
>> software when we made the text of Wikipedia available for download in
>> TomeRaider format? Was that a mistake? Now that I have drawn attention to
>> it, should we delete it from our servers and then burn the hard drives
>> that held it in a purification ritual?
>>
>> We are supporting free software by fully supporting a complete free
>> software stack in the client, and by using free software in the server. It
>> would not help our mission to support free software in this third way --
>> by boycotting non-free client systems.
> 
> I disagree with you. We want to present free content that is freely
> reusable. You cannot freely reuse something you cannot edit with free
> tools.

I too want to have content that you can freely reuse, and that can be
edited with free tools. But I want to support popular non-free client
systems as well, to improve access for readers.

-- Tim Starling