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

[John Vandenberg]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 2:16 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>> "The cost is $X, but if we don't pay it,  then Y% will suddenly be
>> unable to play our video!"
>
> I don't think that's a problem. We can give the users plenty of warning,
> and by that time, the client software will be more mature. Theora will be
> supported in Firefox, and the free clients will be more stable. I don't
> see Theora losing ground in that time.
>
> [...]
>> Tim, I know I'm getting repetitive here, but if there were no lock-in
>> you wouldn't be suggesting flash as a display format at all.  You're
>> not suggesting that it would further our mission to adopt parallel
>> articles in DOCX, etc.   It's the very fact that there is lock-in
>> which leaves us stuck with these problems.
>
> I'm suggesting Flash because I believe that education, not promotion of
> free software, should be our goal. We should only support free software as
> far as it supports that goal. As a community, we believe that free
> software supports our goal a great deal, and that we should use it
> everywhere where it is practical.
>
> Various organisations have distributed Wikipedia text in non-free formats,
> and I hope we continue to encourage that.

Wikimedia Foundation should focus heavily on free content available in
free formats.  True freedom includes the freedom for other
organisations to distribute the content in non-free formats if that
suits their mission.

WMF is primarily a platform for community *creation* of free content
in a re-usable format.  The delivery of that content to end-users can
be achieved in many ways by many other organisations, who may dabble
in non-free formats if they wish.

>> Increased adoption is the only way to avoid that lock-in.
>
> It's not lock-in if we pay the same price now, by excluding people without
> Theora players, as we would pay in the future, by excluding those same
> people.
>
> You argue that we would have to exclude more people in the future, as a
> consequence of Theora losing ground compared to where it is now. I think
> you are overestimating this effect.
>
> [...]
>>
>>> Maybe by that
>>> time, the Thusnelda branch will be finished, and we'll have an codec
>>> library which is competitive with H.264 in terms of output quality.
>>
>> Do you actually think the difference in quality per bitrate between
>> the current Theora encoder and H.264 has any relevance to us?
>
> Not directly, but technical parity might help to convince vendors to
> support it.
>
> [...]
>> If we want to be serious about delivering good video support the
>> current lack of client-side Theora support is not one of the largest
>> barriers.  There are many other important features that we lack which
>> are true for any format, and which are difficult to solve.
>
> Granted. But on principle, I don't want the lack of support for commercial
> client software to be written into our bylaws.

Our bylaws should require that all content is *stored* and
*distributed* in open standards, for the purposes of archival and
accessibility.

I can see merit in WMF transcoding the content to proprietary formats
for *readers*, but I hope WMF doesnt spend its money doing this
without putting a detailed proposal to the community.

--
John V.