On 29/09/06, Ilya Haykinson <haykinson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We say we want to encourage adoption of open formats.
That's fine and dandy
-- let's only allow open formats in uploads. But a large part of our
mission is delivering content and I feel that we've been burying our head in
the sand by pretending that there's no problem with access. I would venture
to say that the vast majority of our users cannot watch or hear any
multimedia files off of our websites. I would also suggest that they are
not likely to, in the next several years at best.
I suggest that if we change our attitude and allow alternative,
actually-workable presentation of our media, we will be more correctly
fulfilling our mission. Let's allow Flash for audio and video.
I think we all recognise that there is a problem with access, but I do
not think that the solution to this problem is the use of non-free
formats. The most important reason for this is that I'm not sure we
could be considered to be delivering "free content" if it is delivered
in a patent-laden format.
It is important that we (the project) do not sacrifice our ideals and
aims for the problems of this particular year. We should focus our
energy on finding solutions which enable us to continue delivering
truly free content to users. The suggestion that we convince Mozilla
to bundle OGG with Firefox sounds good to me. Another possibility is
that we could also come up with methods for delivering the codecs to
the end user more easily.
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)