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

Mon Sep 29 01:08:27 UTC 2008

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> My understanding, from a previous mailing list discussion, was that we can

Your understanding is entirely different from my own. Possibly we were
reading different mailing lists?

My takeaway from the lists I was on was better summed by by this
comment by Brion Vibber in response to Kaltura's video software: "We
won't even consider touching the software itself with a hundred-foot
pole until they can support the free environment and formats we
require. That's a condition they're well aware of."

> As long as the encoder license
> fees are reasonable in proportion to our other operational costs, adding
> proprietary video formats alongside free ones can only increase the
> dissemination of knowledge and assist in our educational mission.

As you can see from the other replies here, several people believe
that supporting non-free formats would be detrimental to the long-term
educational mission -- because the mission is not fulfillable so long
as people feel forced to pay a codec tax on content they take from us.
 Just because Wikimedia can afford it does not mean that everyone can
or should.  (Regarding fees, most formats have per-use fees as well as
encoder fees.)

You could just as easily say "As long as the licensing fees are
reasonable in proportion to our other operational costs, adding
commercial stock photography archives to Wikipedia alongside free
images can only increase the dissemination of knowledge and assist in
our educational mission."  WMF could easily afford to license stock
archives.  Yet it has not. The great demand for images in Wikipedia
allowed Commons to succeed, and now the whole world has a
liberally-licensed stock photography archive that they can use.

In any case, mere assertions are not a compelling argument.  If you
disagree that freely-licensed formats are essential for realizing the
promise of freely-licensed content, I'm sure many people would be
willing to talk that out.  If you don't think that sticking to free
formats exclusively drives adoption, that too can be discussed... or
if you don't agree that realizing the promises of freely licensed
content are part of the mission, likewise.