[Foundation-l] Wikipedia Invites Users to Take Part in Open, Collaborative Video Experiment

Fri Jan 18 23:11:36 UTC 2008

On Jan 18, 2008 5:05 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 1/18/08, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:
> > When Flash itself becomes open-source, I'll join.
>
> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

This is a nice opportunities to inform the spectators about Gnash and
its role in the world.

First a little background,

The web is a remarkable achievement of man kind.  More people than
ever  before have had more ability to learn and speak to others than
ever before in our history.  And while not everyone can access the web
*yet*,  we can see how to get there and the completion of that great
endeavor.

One of the critical factors in the level of freedom and universal
access that the web provides is that the web has historically been
from entirely open technology.  Private interests do not execute
exclusive control over its standards, and they can be implemented by
anyone without patent or other forms of obligation.

Any use of proprietary technology in the web is a serious hurdle in
the goal of completely free and universal access.  A proprietary
technology allows its controlling party to extract a little tax on the
use of that technology.  For someone like me, in a wealthy first world
nation, these fees inconsequential and will be completely hidden for
me, although in order to  maximally preserve that lock-in the software
usually must be proprietary,  when the real mission is to radically
empower the whole world, even and especially the fantastically poor
and to do so while preserving everyone's freedom it simply can't be
tolerated.

Unlike some other people, I do not think companies like Adobe, or
Apple are *evil* for promoting and controlling their proprietary
formats. There is BIG money in doing so, and they have obligations to
their shareholders. If we are willing to pay, they will be willing to
charge. It's their nature, not evil.

But we should be wise and recognize the history, and know that
proprietary formats are bad for the public interest and demand better.

Now Gnash,

There is a big problem today: For the first time in a long time a
substantial portion of the web is NOT USABLE with a free environment.
 While flash has had a reasonable level of adoption for some time it
use was mostly limited to a subset of entertainment websites. The
damage was limited.

In the last year or so, Flash has become widely used on sites that a
lot of people care about.  This sudden growth in use isn't really
attributable to any great technology in flash, but rather because when
flash got video support it filled a gap in the web feature set which
existed because all the popular video formats were also proprietary
and too busy warring with each other (MSFT vs APPLE vs REAL vs..)

So this has created a tremendous bleeding,  people promoting free
software systems are encountering pushback which they wouldn't have
otherwise.  "This free software computer sucks! It can't play flash!".

This is where Gnash comes in. It stops the bleeding.  "Here, now this
free software computer plays flash so you can migrate."

Gnash does not, however, solve most of the worst issues with flash:
1) No free authoring tools for flash. People who don't pay the piper
can read but not write.
2) Flash de-facto standard purely controlled by a single commercial
interest. (Think "Flash aint done till Gnash won't run")
3) Flash (video) can not be completely and compatibility implemented
without infringing a number of recent (and solid) software patents
(incidentally, unlike most software patents, codec patents are fairly
well established in Europe in the sense that a lot of European
companies hold them and a lot of European companies are paying for
them).

So, Gnash stems the bleeding. It is good and deserves support. But
Gnash does not stop the injury. The promotion of flash content is
creating the injury and it can only be stopped by widespread use of
free alternatives.

Fortunately free alternatives for most of flash's applications already
exist, at least piecewise.

1) Javascript + SVG enabled web-browsers can natively do most of what
flash does.
2) Native free format video support for that above will soon exist in
popular browsers.
3) Java is still more far powerful than flash for programmability, and
has mostly resolved the freedom issues.

The mere existence of free alternatives is not enough to make the use
of flash acceptable:  Because if the free alternatives are not widely
used they will have hidden costs (convincing people to install
players, etc).  Proprietary vendors know this and adjust their prices
to be just over the hidden costs.

In cases where free formats are healthy and widely used, no
proprietary format can thrive, because wide adoption is more valuable
than any feature or price.   Think about formats like HTML and JPG:
Proprietary alternatives exist and have clear technical benefits. Yet
they are not used on the web, no one is asking us to use them.  When a
free format is healthy, no one bothers competing with it. When a free
format is not widely adopted, it nearly might as well not exist in
terms of its ability to do good for the world.

Since Wikimedia's mission involves helping the world receive and share
the knowledge of the world and preserving their freedom in the
process, it must maintain its historical commitment to the exclusive
use of free formats.

We are in an almost unique position among high profile websites in
that our mission is not to maximize short term revenue, but to
maximize long term intellectual freedom and knowledge. Because of that
our cost function is different than other groups, so while being
charged $1/download + $1million cap on some proprietary format is
attractive to another site vs the costs of driving serious adoption of
free formats, for us it's the other way around. For us the exclusive
use of free formats makes more sense even if it were to cost us more,
because it is needed for our mission.

> Kaltura is actively exploring different ways to build a UI that runs
> only on open source components:

Can we please start using the words Free Software on these matters?
Open source is a pretty broad and heavily overloaded term and only
describes a subset of what we have historically accepted.   I think
you mean free software here, not Open Source, but just to avoid
confusion we should probably use the more specific and clearly defined
term.

> * helping out the Gnash developers

Gnash should be helped, and the FSF has been directing a lot of
support at them.. because Gnash is important to getting users to
switch to free software.

In terms of the freeness of Wikipedia and the web in general, Gnash
does not solve the problem.

For our interest it is far more important that the web, and or own
sites, be made of successful free formats than it is that people feel
comfortable replacing their Windows/Mac desktops with GNU/Linux.

Gnash doesn't stop the propritarization of the web, it just helps
avoid locking out free software desktops a form of collateral damage.

> * implementing a simpler UI using either HTML/JavaScript, or Java

If there is an equally powerful UI not based on proprietary tech like
flash then we should simply use that, exclusively. At that point about
60% of my argument vanishes.  Sounds great.  The announcement should
have waited for that.

> * lobbying for an open source release of Adobe Flash itself,

By all means... As the viability of free alternatives becomes more
clear this will become more likely, since it's better to have inertial
control if you won't be able to maintain legal control. But don't hold
your breath.   It'll be another 15+ years until enough patents expire
that they won't remain an easy point to gum up alternative
implementations at will.

> I'm sure they will appreciate feedback from the more technical folks
> on this list to work towards a fully open source solution for both the
> player and the editor components.

> They've been highly responsive in
> addressing community concerns, which is the primary reason we're
> working with them: if our cooperation with them incentivizes them to
> - change their license from CC-BY-NC-SA to CC-BY-SA

Which they did, apparently without notice to the copyright holders of
the already uploaded user contributed content on their site.
Ugh.

> - release their existing code under GPLv3

It's nice for people to release things, but equivalents everything
they have released has long existed in already open form. There are
other mediawiki extensions that add an embed tag, and other open flash
video editors. Additionally, these other solutions are already
complete while the Kaltura stuff depends on secret sauce

> - seriously explore Ogg Theora & Ogg Vorbis codecs

Welp you've asked them to waste their time then:  You can't currently
implement Theora or Vorbis codecs in flash like you can in Java.
People have explored this in depth.

> - publicly support open standards & open source

s/support/lip service/
::shrugs:: It's better than nothing.

> - work towards a 100% open collaborative video solution,

Working is nice, but you need to have a realistic roadmap. So long as
flash is on the table, and so long as their are not surprising
changes, this goal is not possible.

[snip]
> The primary cost associated with this project is the time spent on
> mailing lists arguing about it :-)

The skill of communication, and especially listening, has the amazing
power of dispelling many arguments.

You have personally advocated flash in several different forms on our
lists in the past and many people have listened, then told you why
they do not consider it acceptable.  Unfortunately, you did not
listen, and have gone on to put us on this path of disagreement.

This isn't even just a case of taking action which disregards
pre-existing community efforts without consulting the community, it's
also a case of taking an action which you should have known was
squarely against a long and widely held position on the acceptability
of flash.

I asked several pointed questions regarding the foundation's failure
here to promote the works of our own contributors, or pre-existing
free software implementations, rather than rewarding a "prodigal sons"
who hasn't even yet completed the promises.   While my reply was
targeted at Jay, it seems that you're probably in a much more informed
position to respond, by no means should my questions be considered
limited to any person.  I'd love to hear replies from anyone in the
foundation on this subject.