On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 2:16 PM, Milos Rancic [email protected] wrote:
On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Gerard Meijssen [email protected] wrote:
Hoi, Milos who do you want to kid ? A new computer with all the trimmings is able to have multiple pieces of software open at the same time, it is able to listen to music, have muliple applications running that contact the Internet and it still performs really well. An old computer may be able to run Firefox or Open Office and it does work on Windows XP or Linux in the same way.
The key point is that there are two demographics and they should not be mixed to make a believable argument.
A laptop old 4 years is able to run ~100 tabs of Firefox 3 (separated in windows, of course), OpenOffice2.x and play music. When we meet, I may demonstrate it to you. (Of course, on GNU/Linux.)
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I believe that all of this takes away from the core point that Milos has made, however, this being that our goal is not "free of charge to read". It is, instead, the goal of freedom to copy, modify, and/or redistribute content without encumbrances of requesting permission or having to use nonfree software. I think the "principled author" test is an excellent one to determine if a given distribution mechanism meets that goal. In the case of Flash, it clearly does not.
We also should recall that Wikimedia is not exactly a bit player. If we distribute media in the Ogg/Theora formats, and provide a "Can't play this file? Click here" link next to them, we will be enabling and promoting the use of these formats, as a user who installs the appropriate software for those formats can now view them anywhere, not just on Wikimedia projects. Given Wikimedia's size and popularity, that impact would be substantial. We should be supporting free software and formats, not undermining them just because a nonfree format might be more popular.