[Foundation-l] File format policy

Sat Jan 19 22:40:58 UTC 2008

On 19/01/2008, Florence Devouard <anthere at anthere.org> wrote:

> Resolution:File format policy
> Whereas an essential part of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission is
> encouraging the development of free-content educational resources that
> may be created, used, and reused by a diverse community, without
> restriction, and because we believe that this mission requires thriving
> open formats and open standards on the web to allow the creation of
> content not subject to restrictions on creation, use, and reuse, it is
> resolved that all material, text , multimedia, or software, on Wikimedia
> Foundation projects must be in a format that is:
> 1. Viewable or playable by existing free software tools
> 2. Able to be created or edited by existing free software tools.
> 3. Defined by an open standard, implementation, or specification not
> under proprietary control
> 4. Not itself subject to material patent-related restrictions on use
> that are incompatible with free software, nor only able to be authored
> or viewed by software so restricted.
> 5. Not encrypted or otherwise subject to technical protection measures
> incompatible with the permissions of free content licensing.
> where "free software" is software under any licensing terms that meet
> the Free Software Definition.
> Where an independently-used subset of the format meets these criteria,
> even if some files in that format do not (as with PDF and encrypted
> PDF), files in that subset qualify as acceptable formats under the text
> of this resolution.

FWIW: I also forwarded this to the FSFE discussion list, noting that
it was a draft and asking them to check it for loopholes - the FSF is
good at spotting loopholes.

- d.