[Foundation-l] The problem with Flash

[Ben McIlwain]

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Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> Nobody is saying that we should use it now. Everybody says that the
> situation with Flash is not good. Nobody holds their breath until Adobe
> releases its patents. But this whole situation is out of proportion, it is
> not what open source is about. When people wanted file server support they
> started the Samba <http://us3.samba.org/samba/> project.

"Until Adobe releases its patents" - that's about as likely as hell
freezing over.  They're never going to do that when their entire
business model consists of milking money from their widespread non-free
proprietary system.  That's why we can't use Flash - we have to use
something that is truly free.  There are all sorts of free software
multimedia players released in Java that we can integrate into MediaWiki
a lot more easily than this vaporware Flash player, so why are we even
wasting our time on this partnership?  And why are you vociferously
defending it when it is so obviously not nearly the kind of thing we
should be involving ourselves with?

And one final note: many of the patents that Flash is encumbered with,
such as the MPG and audio patents, are not Adodbe's to release anyway.
So even if they completely released the patents on their Flash
technology (fat chance!), we still couldn't use them, because all of the
codecs needed for media support are still proprietary and non-free.
It's a completely dead end.  Forget Kaltura and their vaporware product
that we wouldn't be able to use even if it was completed - let's focus
our efforts on proven free software solutions that already have
significant functionality completed.
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