On Wed, 2005-04-20 at 18:05 -0700, Joseph Sinclair wrote:
> Didn't mean to start a format war, I don't claim any given format is
> technically superior, only that there are great advantages to open
> formats and open software. As such, here is my response to your
> arguments:
>
> If you want to know what's wrong with closed formats, take a look at
> a .MSP image file (if you can find a system running Windows 2.1, the
> last that had a viewer), or try to watch an Autodesk movie (you'll
> have to find an old Windows 3.0 system, and try to find a licensed
> player, since the right-to-use of the "free" player went away over 10
> years ago). The fact is that another company CANNOT take the place of
> a defunct multimedia company, the defunct company still holds
> patents/copyrights, may not have ever published the format, and
> there's no way to obtain a license from a non-existent entity.
> Furthermore, the company may not go out of business, they may just
> decide they don't like the format anymore (like the MSP format). If
> the company that owns the format decides to de-support it, you're
> completely out of luck, since nobody else can write applications using
> that format. The other problem that arises is patents on the format,
> this happened to MP3 a few years ago when the company that developed
> the algorithms (and GAVE them to the MPEG-1 committee) asserted patent
> rights to all MP3 audio, and began charging licensing fees to
> developers of software that plays MP3. Any format owner could do the
> same, or even use their patent rights to force all competing players
> to stop playing "their" format. There's nothing that could stop them,
> and that's part of why media players on Linux often don't play some
> formats, Microsoft formats, in particular, are both patented, and
> owned by a company that's shown they are more than willing to use
> those patents to eliminate all players on non-Microsoft platforms (or
> better yet, eliminate the competing platform entirely).
>
> Closed multimedia formats are not available to free/open-source
> developers. We cannot pay for a patent license, cannot purchase the
> format documentation (if it's available), and choose not to make
> ourselves subject to the whims of another entity. This means that if
> a site is built using closed formats, chances are that there are not
> any F/OSS solutions available to support the site, so the site-builder
> is beholden to whichever proprietary company owns the format they
> choose. Choosing Flash means putting considerable control over your
> site's future in the hands of Macromedia, many people find that
> unsettling.
>
> We don't have a different format from each media creator because the
> market already declined that model, the companies tried that around
> 1992-93 and again in 1996-97, and it flopped completely. Sony, in
> particular, tries to create a new Sony-owned "standard" every few
> years (MemoryStick, BetaMax, SDRM, SVBS, Blu-Ray, etc...),
> fortunately, they generally fail, and in other cases, the other market
> giants eventually force the "standard" open, so they can compete on
> even ground. There's nothing wrong with having a wide variety of
> media players, that's called competition, and it's a good thing. The
> problem is if every player uses a different format, and that's when
> things get bad. Committing to open formats helps to prevent every
> player from having their own format, since once an open format is
> widespread, all competing formats tend to die out.
>
> I don't know what businesses you deal with, but most of the businesses
> I deal with are looking for global market expansion, and hearing that
> 30% of the world cannot view their "cool new site" has an impact; it
> may not make the final decision, but it does have an impact.
>
> If you want an alternative to Flash, it DOES exist, it's called SVG,
> it's a W3C standard, and it's completely open. The tools to work with
> SVG are rapidly approaching parity with Macromedia's development tool,
> and there are a number of processing pipelines available to SVG that
> Flash could never use (ever try to apply an XSL stylesheet to Flash,
> for country-specific translations, for instance). Sure, the F/OSS
> software to create SVG still needs work, but solutions do exist, and
> there are a couple of proprietary solutions that can create SVG
> equivalent to about 90% of the flash sites on the web.
>
> IE plays SVG out of the box too, you just have to download the Adobe
> SVG plugin (you have to download the Flash plugin on new systems too,
> because the one shipping with Windows is outdated, and most sites
> require the newer plugin, since content creators are *required* to
> continually "upgrade" to the latest Macromedia version or lose
> support). The support for viewing SVG on Linux/Mac,etc... is similar
> to the support for playing Flash, so the current state of SVG support
> is equivalent to the current state of Flash support. The near-term
> prospects for SVG support on various platforms is very good, since the
> code being worked on for Firefox 1.1 will work everywhere Firefox
> works.
>
> People pick WMV because they think it's free-as-in-beer, since it
> comes with their 2003 license (although there are a bunch of recurring
> charges they don't find out about until later). In my experience,
> "savvy" owners ask a technology expert, and a lot of us are
> recommending OGG with Vorbis and Theora, since those formats cannot be
> taken away from you, de-supported, or abandoned, and the creator has
> complete control over usage, including the *option* to apply use
> restrictions, if they want, not because the format owner requires it
> of them. The majority of sites that do not use the open streaming
> media formats do so because they're run by corporate types who don't
> care about the media format, they just want everything on their
> systems to come from a single vendor (hence the increasing rate of
> adoption for Microsoft formats). Most of the Flash sites, however,
> are created by small web-design firms, and those of us in the
> technology industry have the ability to influence those firms.
>
> By the way, Flash is NOT an alternative to Quicktime, WMV, or Real.
> Flash files are vector images drawn (as by a cartoonist) using a
> Macromedia tool. When you see "real" movies in a Flash site, it's the
> Flash player calling-out to the Windows Media Player DLL's (Quicktime
> libraries on Mac) to play an embedded WMV, MPEG, or AVI file. The
> open option for streaming media is OGG, Vorbis, and Theora. The open
> option for rich-multimedia websites is SVG. Note also, OGG (which is
> a container, not a codec), Vorbis, and Theora are supported in most
> media players in Windows, Mac, and Linux, so site creators lose
> nothing by using them, and gain quite a bit in terms of the freedom to
> run their site according to their own preferences. There are other
> open codecs available for streaming media, and many sites actually do
> use these, but the only ones, AFAIK, guaranteed to be free of patent
> are Vorbis and Theora.
----
Can you say DRM ?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
is probably far more articulate than I could ever be. It just seems to
me that until you toss the yoke of slavery off your back, you will
always be a slave.
I'll quit there - except for one thing - Joseph, please consider sending
text format instead of html - it really made it hard to read.
Craig
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