From Mindspillage
From a post to Foundation-l on why Wikimedia should not support patent-encumbered file formats. Wording edited to provide missing context and correct awkward phrasing.
I'd say without thinking I go too far out on a limb that we all think having thriving and universally usable free formats is a state of the world we should support. So from there: viable free formats are necessary to ensure the continued ability of individuals to freely create and distribute free content. And allowing individuals to freely create and distribute free content is a core goal of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Given that, my strong preference is against parallel distribution in patent-encumbered formats. Not because I don't agree that we should reach more people, but because it's sacrificing a long-term goal for a short-term benefit. And because of that, I do not agree that we are obligated to maximize short-term reach. We are obligated to do that which best fulfills our mission of providing —and continuing to be able to provide—free educational content.
An earlier message says that the only reason not to is because we value free formats for their own sake over a wider reach, but this is incorrect. If the free formats are not used by anyone, they die. When you say that the free formats are not as good and that we need to provide others to reach people, you're effectively saying that there's no truly free format, that it is not thriving, that there is some real or perceived cost to using the free format which prevents people from using it.
You're saying implicitly that because there is no broadly-adopted free format, there exists a need for one.
The proprietary formats are not fundamentally easier to use than the free formats, but the users have already installed whatever they need to install to view the proprietary content from other websites— so without incentive to do otherwise, they will take the easiest route and use the format they already know and use. Huge [[network effect]]s apply in format adoption—people use a format because other people are using it. The leader will continue to gain ground unless some powerful force stops the trend..
These other formats aren't free, and their ubiquity may restrict the ability to freely create content in the future. (There are, currently, no free creation toolsets for Flash.) For many there are no licensing fees or broad restrictions on use now. But by establishing and enabling dependence on these formats, we cripple our ability to reject those terms when this changes. Licensing terms for proprietary formats have customarily been priced as high as licensees are willing to bear before it's a better deal to incur the costs of switching to a different format.
The other media providers are, with rare exception, not providing content in the free formats. (Many of them have made deals that explicitly involve refusing to distribute media in certain free formats, in exchange for a better deal on license fees for the formats they do provide, in fact.) Without a large collection of work in the free format to encourage people to use it, and to have the codecs installed, no one else will use it either.
One of Nokia's points regarding video standards in HTML5 was that Theora was irrelevant, as nobody uses it. Those writing contrary positions pointed to Wikimedia's use, and because of it were able to say that there's a top-10 site that only uses Theora, and for the same reasons that it's being proposed as a web standard. Without our use, this statement would have been much less powerful.
I do think that we should make it as easy as possible to use the free formats. Our media help pages currently give good guidance on this, and tools like the WikiMediaPlayer (OggHandler) have made the free formats usable for most who visit without any additional effort on their part. And most users really don't care which format it is as long as it plays. The free formats are not harder to use. (At least, no harder to use than anything else that requires software installation, such as RealPlayer or Flash plugins.) They don't require technical expertise. They don't require users to know or care about free software and open standards. They're just less popular.
But if we compromise this goal—and I think we can agree that having a thriving free format for all media types is a goal—we drastically lower the chances of anyone else being able to bring it about without us. We shouldn't act in a way that hurts the future our mission is supposed to bring about.