[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation's partnership with Kaltuna and loss of freedom

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Jan 17, 2008 6:38 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> Ignoring all of the ad hominems above, I think the collaboration would be
> fruitful as long as the Kaltura logo and and the "Powered by Kaltura"
> notices are removed and there is a link allowing people to bypass that
> player completely and simply download the file in a free format. If those
> were not removed, I would be completely against the collaboration.

They can't put their logo on their own site? Come on.

None of this stuff is running on Wikimedia systems because it isn't
free software, not yet usable without proprietary tools, and not yet
cooked. Iff those things become true, then it might be used in the
future. Do you really begrudge them the ability to spam their logo
around on sites which are not Wikimedia's?

Mostly what Kaltura does today is provide a slide-show with audio sync
functionality.  We already have support for turning galleries into
slideshows (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen/Slideshow)
that needs only fairly basic client JS support.  It doesn't allow the
audio syncing of Kaltura, site level timing, or fancy transitions, but
I think these things are not so interesting for slideshows on
Wikimedia sites.

It's far more likely that we'll adopt an extension that embeds
slideshows using JS than kaltura as it is today. Something like iframe
that replaces an single image, and provides flip controls, like you
often see on ebay auctions would be pretty useful in some contexts.

> A
> wikilink to the article on Kaltura would be an acceptable replacement in my
> mind. Gnash would be an ideal implementation, but I doubt that it is up to
> the task.

Gnash isn't up to the task. At some point in the future it may be, but
that actually wouldn't solve many of the problems with flash.  For
example, there are no free authoring tools.   So flash is like a tax
on the creation of content, only people who pay it are permitted to be
authors.  Thats a step backwards on these last decades path to
universal access to intellectual freedom.

> Flash is a global standard with deep penetration and allows the
> most people to get the most information.

Perhaps we're going to have to stop using the word 'standard' if
people around here are going to abuse it like this.

Flash isn't a standard in anything but the "defacto standard" sense.
It *is* widely used.   But it's still proprietary, controlled by a
single company, has no complete free implementation of the client
software (and if it did the control issue would kill the value of it,
think "Flash aint done till gnash won't run"),  no free authoring
toolchain, and any complete implementation requires patented
technology.

Furthermore there are alternatives to flash already widely deployed
*today*.  DHTML, Javascript, and SVG together already provide nearly
complete coverage of flash's client capabilities, the only major gaps
are audio and video, which will be resolved (using free codecs) in an
upcoming firefox version (which implements WHATWG HTML5).  Go look
take a look at the video on
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/08/svg-video-demo.html

Will every browser out there support Javascript well enough to build
tools like that? No. Will they all support flash 9, no.

Other than the native browser integration, as far as client side
computation goes Java is still far more powerful. We use decoders for
the Ogg/Vorbis and theora formats written in Java, you simply can't do
that with flash.  Java is also free software now, with solid free
client support, solid free authoring tools, multiple complete
independent implementations, and it's controlled via an informal
public standards process.

It's also important to keep in mind that all these fancy dynamic
programmed web tools (toys?) are utter killers of accessibility.  This
is an unsolved issue. They also all require far more powerful client
devices, they also all don't work in paper format, or on most
non-computer electronic access devices.  They also present additional
challenges to users, reading text on the web is a very basic skill but
these tools, used too widely or carelessly, turn webpages into
applications which must be themselves learned. Anyone who runs flash
probably has the experiences of hitting some whiz-bang website turned
completely unusable by having an unusual interface that no one can
figure out.