[Foundation-l] Response to message by thread breaking nazi.

[Brion Vibber]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> There is the simple fact that Kaltura is flash based, which the
> Foundation should have well known to establish as a deal breaker form
> day one, since that has been the outcome of all previous discussions
> on the matter. Though that isn't really much of a criticism of Kaltura
> itself, though it's a solid reason why it should not be used on
> Wikimedia sites.

When I was asked for feedback on a potential agreement to look at
Kaltura's video editor thing, I pointed out that a purely Flash-based
tool would never be acceptable to us.

1) Adobe Flash supports *only* patent-encumbered video and audio formats
(eg MP3, FLV, H.264), and *no* royalty-free formats (eg Vorbis, Theora).
As a matter of policy we can't require people to use patent-encumbered
formats, and it remains a matter of debate whether we wish to (or can)
use automated transcoding to provide both patent-free and patented formats.

2) Adobe Flash itself is non-free software, so we can't as a matter of
policy require people to have it to access things on the site.

3) Free alternatives (Gnash etc) are still playing catch-up; at a
minimum, any Flash tool we support *must* work with the current version
of Gnash.


This cleanly nixed any kind of agreement with them where we might look
at their tool as it stands today.

As a result, the requirement for compatibility with Ogg Theora and Gnash
was made. Since their software isn't anywhere *near* that level of
compatibility, we have no interest at all in it today.

If and when they reach it, we'll be happy to take a look at it, and
we're happy to encourage them to reach that goal.

That's our only obligation.


Now, the issue of dual formats (patented and patent-free formats
side-by-side as compatibility alternates) remains open. There have been
discussions at the board level, which as far as I know have yet to reach
a conclusion.

What we can say for sure is that if a firm decision is made to forbid
even compatibility-alternate use of patented formats, this would nix our
ability to even consider a Flash/Gnash-based video tool.

A tool which supported *only* Vorbis/Theora on Gnash would not work on
Adobe Flash, which would make it useless for what, 99.9% of the web
population?


If the decision is made to allow patented and patent-free formats to sit
side by side as compatiblity alternates, then we might still be
interested in Flash-based tools, as we could support both Adobe Flash
and free Gnash (which as it improves is likely to be more often
supported out of the box on various Linux distros).


Of course Flash remains a proprietary format; the open authoring tools
have required reverse-engineering the format and opcodes. There's no
standardization, no official specs or compatibility profiles. We can
expect Adobe to keep adding in more proprietary things, and the free
tools can continue to play catch-up.

So we still have to look at Flash suspciously as a matter of trade-offs.
The good thing is that it has some nice capabilities and it's *very*
widely installed. The bad is that it's not an open standard, free
alternatives are still limited, and we have the patent issues on video
and audio codecs used.


So we certainly have no intention of abandoning other projects. We're
supporting MetaVid with SVN hosting already, and we'll be happy to do
what we can for anybody else working on awesome things.

*Especially* awesome things built on open standards and patent-free codecs.

-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)