FLOSS Codecs Emerge Victorious In Wikimedia Vote

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Maggs from the Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team has given a final summary of the discussion and vote about whether to support MP4 video or not. Twice as many people voted against adding MP4 to Wikimedia than voted for full support. Now they can get back to their mission of advocating openness. 'Those opposing MP4 adoption believe that in order for what we create to be truly free, the format that it is in also needs to be free, (else everyone viewing it would need to obtain a patent license in some form to be able to view it). ... From that viewpoint, any software infrastructure in Wikimedia projects must adhere to community norms regarding intellectual property, patent status, licensing or encoding methods. Current community requirements are that free/open standards should be used at all times to encode and store video files on the servers that house our data, so that both our content and software can be redistributed without any restrictions. Proprietary video containers or codecs such as MP4 are not allowed on Wikimedia projects because they are patent-encumbered and their software cannot be re-licensed freely (though MP4 content can be freely re-licensed).'"

Re:Thin.

[sk999]

"If you know anyone who cannot legally play an MP4 video, I would like to meet them."

How is someone to know if they are or are not legally allowed to play MP4?

Re:Tempest in a tea pot

[Vanders]

The users are exactly the people they're thinking about. Because in ten years time, it's the users who'll be happy not to deal with some proprietary closed format that isn't supported on their new device, because sadly it's obsolete and no one cares about Intel Indeo, oh sorry, I mean, MPEG-2, oh wait, I mean, h.264. They care because by using an open format they stand a chance of providing support to the latest iBrain 7, without having to destroy the content with yet another lossy conversion.

Of course if your outlook is limited to the short term of less than the next 12 months then I guess the decision looks bad, but then you're not thinking about the long game.