[Foundation-l] [Commons-l] We should permit Flash video playback

[Erik Moeller]

Gregory, the problem with your position is the fundamental assumption
of bad faith that runs through so many of your arguments. Whether it's
Creative Commons 3.0 or a collaboration with the Archive, other
organizations are always insufficiently committed to freedom and
therefore impossible to collaborate with.

The problem with this kind of free culture isolationism is that
dogmatic blindness achieves exactly the opposite of what you are
hoping for. It will lead to other projects which haven't spend a
minute even thinking about the implications of copyright and file
format policies becoming dominant, simply because they choose to adopt
mainstream technology and put ease of use before anything else. It
will lead to us being overwhelmed and understaffed as we refuse to
accept help from anyone who isn't already carrying the same flag we
are carrying. We need balance and reason, not dogma and hostility.

Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, Mozilla, and others are very
valuable institutions of a broadly defined movement towards making
terabytes worth of cultural works available online, reducing barriers
to access, providing freely usable & freely licensed tools, developing
sane legal frameworks, and so on. I, too, would prefer it if these
institutions would generally advocate similarly high standards of
freedom as we do, and where this is not the case, I generally try to
persuade them to do so.

However, that does not negate their efforts, nor does it mean that we
should avoid working with them. We should try to help them when we
think they could do better. We should treat them as potential friends
and allies, not alienate them with a priori assumptions about their
motives and their direction.

Case in point: You argue that the Archive is not a suitable partner
because they are currently not supporting Theora. Well, they are
already supporting Vorbis for many of their audio collections, and
according to Brewster, the main reason for the lack of Theora support
is quite simply that there has not been substantial demand for it so
far. We, as a partner, could make it quite clear that Theora is a
requirement for a collaboration around video hosting. Indeed, I
already said as much to Brewster, and he signaled that adding Theora
support to their transcoding pipeline would not be much of an issue at
all.

If you want to effect policy changes in other organizations, you need
to start talking to them! A partnership with WMF would push them
towards adopting free formats, because it would be an implicit
requirement for such a partnership to happen. Similarly, their Terms
of Service were last updated in March 2001, before Creative Commons
and others even existed to raise awareness of the importance of
licensing and content freedom. I doubt that anyone but the lawyer who
wrote the thing even has looked at it since then. Have you tried to
send them feedback about it? Once again, _talk_ to people, don't just
condemn what they are doing.

It's exactly the same with CC 3.0 and many other issues. Your stance
tends to be: "No! These people are doing bad things! We should stay
away from them! Don't you dare talk to them!"  My position is: If we
want our ideas to spread, we need to reach out to others and
_convince_ them, not condemn them, as part of the process of
collaboration. And, if that process goes both ways, and people in our
community are convinced that they are sometimes too militaristic about
certain issues, I don't think that would be unhealthy or unhelpful at
all.

Yours is a position of rigid, dogmatic isolationism -- not one of
open-minded, thoughtful outreach.  That's regrettable, and I do not
share it, and intend to continue talking to others, listening to them,
and trying to reason with them instead. Wikimedia needs to go beyond
navel gazing and self-paralysis; it needs to continue to reinvent
itself and work with others in achieving its mission of building a
global, free culture and achieving free education for all.
-- 
Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
Erik

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the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.