Holger Levsen schrieb: > First of all, thanks to Maik for bringing this up here!
Well, I'm a user of free software so this topic is in my very interest ;) I totally missed you already brought this to the project mailing list - I fired another mail to debian-project before noticing that. Sorry for the spam. I propose moving the whole discussion to debian-project as it's really mostly a political thing (beh, patents over and over again) and not so much a technical thing developers are interested in. > So despite the technical and philosophical details whether we should ignore > patents or whatnot, what can we do to voice our support for a standard with > mandates free codecs instead of propietary ones? (Which IMO is quite > obvious.) > > So how can Debian make an official statement? Do we have to wait until the > end > of the DPL elections? (April 8th) > > Maik, whats the timeline in this discussion? I'm not aware of any deadline up until a set of formats has to be chosen. I think there's room for action until the WHATWG 1.0 spec is "final" - no idea when that'll happen. I think a sensible goal would be to just defend the current wording of the WHATWG working draft, which happens to elevate the free Ogg codecs to a "SHOULD be supported" state. It has been proposed to REQUIRE browsers to support those formats, but that has no real chance of happening because the WHATWG is also targeted at platforms that may not happen to be able to support the Ogg codecs (or any other multimedia format). SHOULD is as good as it'll ever get IMO. So what has to be done to preserve the current wording? Somehow Apple needs to be convinced that it's acceptable for them to no demand to kill it. They are part of the MPEG industry and their motivation seems to be clear: They obviously may want to feed their own horse. Simply overrunning the whatwg list with well-spirited, but unofficial postings may be ineffective (they may simply stop listening). What we need is an official and polite inquiry that sheds some light onto the position of the free software world - and that would be (amongst other things) "We want to stay free and we want our citizens to be first class citizens on the web". (If someone knows a good contact to the FSF: They may be interested to see free formats getting more widely deployed, too.) > And hmm, unfortunatly WHATWG is not affiliated with W3C, which as a nice > patent policy... :-( But we can use this as another argument :) See > http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/ - summary at > http://www.w3.org/2004/02/05-patentsummary.html I think the WHATWG proposal have a good chance of becoming "official" W3C standards over time. Maik Merten -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
