[Foundation-l] Freedom, standards, and file formats

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 5:28 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> No, they are going to follow the link "If you can't see this video
>> click here" and install the viewer.  You just then need to get some
>> video into some mainstream articles.  Wikipedia then has just
>> single-handily expanded the install base for Theora, and it's down the
>> slippery slope to widespread adoption.
>
> Do we have any evidence to support this?

To the more general question of "Does this approach work for anyone?",
absolutely yes: Thats how flash was adopted. Sites said 'click-here'.
People clicked.  Some time later, massive adoption... An over
simplification, but basically correct. Flash adoption happened without
any major OS or browser vendors shipping flash support.    It may be,
however, that the above only works for youtube and strong-bad, and not
Wikipedia.

We do have some direct. evidence, however.  Back when the video player
was something I ran off the toolserver there were complete access logs
which allowed me to track how often the player worked for people and
get a little bit of information on why it failed.   I do not have the
logs anymore,  but I believe that I found something like 1/3rd of the
IPs that did not support Java came back later with Java installed. (It
helped that the player had a link to SUN's java download site).
This measurement is not particularly good for a multitude of reasons
and may not apply now (the current player does not have good links to
help people install support), so I wouldn't suggest to giving it much
weight,  but it does demonstrate that objective data on this can be
collected.

Considering the prior-probability ('it worked for flash'), I think it
would be prudent to follow mboverload's assumption until data is
collected that indicates otherwise.  It's necessary to collect the
data in any case since the same data can be used to help maximize the
effect (it's why I was bothering to consider it myself back then:  at
the time no one was really advocating that we use flash, I needed to
know in order to make the player work for more people)