[Foundation-l] File format policy (was: Response to message by thread breaking nazi)

[Michael Bimmler]

On Jan 20, 2008 12:13 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19/01/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > The thing that jumps out at me is the unqualified use of "must". This
> > policy would make it impossible to use content for which there are no
> > free formats (not that I can think of any examples of such content at
> > the moment). Is that intentional? A "where possible" could be added to
> > get around it if it's not intentional. (I'm undecided on whether it
> > would be good to completely ban such material or not.)
>
>
> Are there formats that *cannot* be transcoded into something free?
>
> (e.g. the Library of Congress has some fantastic US public domain
> scans ... as TIFFs; but these can be made into PNGs losslessly. MPEG2
> is unacceptable, transcode to Theora isn't *too* lossy, MS Word can be
> transformed into ODF [even though Wikimedia only allows OpenOffice 1.x
> and not ODF as yet], etc.)
>

Ahem, I changed the topic, the old one was hurting my eyes ;-)

Michael