Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC's DRM Iplayer windows only

[Dave Page]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 02:12:37PM +0000, Noah Slater wrote:

> The FSF's support of Flash is a very clever strategic position and
> absolutely essential if we are to get regular users to make the switch
> to a free operating system.

"are we working for freedom, or have we replaced that goal with the
shallow goal of popularity?" - rms, http://www.a42.com/node/50

> Flash is the defacto multimedia format on the WWW at the moment
> and that isn't going to change any time soon.

Not if the foremost organisation supporting open standards and free
software is supporting the reverse-engineering of a complicated moving
target, no. All Adobe has to do to maintain the lead is to out-develop
Gnash, or introduce features like DRM that Gnash would be ethically
wrong to implement. Oh wait, didn't they already introduce DRM in Flash
9?

Users don't care about Flash, they care about watching video and
animations on the Internet. Hosters like Google and YouTube and everyone
else don't care about Flash, they just use it because it's the best
thing out there and they don't care about freedom.

If the FSF were to put its weight behind open formats rather than Flash,
we'd reach your "any time soon" much sooner. Then there'd be fair
competition between the open and closed *formats*.

I'm not saying that Gnash is a bad thing, or that it should be scrapped
(especially since as free software it has the potential to do much more
than just support the Flash format), but I do think that the FSF should
be making open format support a priority project rather than Gnash.

Dave
-- 
Dave Page <address@hidden>
Jabber: address@hidden