[Foundation-l] Response to message by thread breaking nazi.

Sat Jan 19 21:43:34 UTC 2008

> 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.

The thing that jumps out at me is the unqualified use of "must". This
policy would make it impossible to use content for which there are no
free formats (not that I can think of any examples of such content at
the moment). Is that intentional? A "where possible" could be added to
get around it if it's not intentional. (I'm undecided on whether it
would be good to completely ban such material or not.)