Re: [gst-devel] Re: Helix Player virtual team meeting

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Thu, 2003-12-11 at 13:52, Lee Braiden wrote:
> On Thursday 11 Dec 2003 6:30 pm, Andrew Sobala wrote:
> > But as hackers, a lot of us want our program *and all its dependencies*
> > to be Free so the whole thing can be modified, and given to our friend
> > across the road without breaking any laws.
> 
> Moreover, we like our end-products to be open too -- hence the enthusiastic 
> investment in blender so that people can develop free models, free plugins, 
> free scenes, and free open source movies.  Hence, the interest in free 
> compilers for free code.
> 
> We don't want to produce videos in a closed format that aren't guaranteed to 
> be available in future.  No more than we want to distribute documents in Word 
> format.  We want to distribute videos that can be opened and edited on any 
> open source platform, knowing that platform has and always will have the 
> tools available to use the video.
> 
> In this sense, real video formats, unless completely open, cannot ever be more 
> than backwards compatibility options to be replaced by Theora, etc.
> 
> Finally, and still most importantly for me, what Open Source desktops need 
> most right now in terms of multimedia is a standardised API so that all video 
> tools can automatically access the same codecs, etc.
> 
> I want to know that any movies I make in a 3D app can be encoded in all of the 
> formats my NLE app can handle.  I want to know that my movie player can play 
> them all back just as easily, and that my open source game can play them as 
> an intro sequence.  It's only logical.
> 
> So, while others question technical license details, I'm simply asking this... 
> what's being offered that Open Source needs or wants?

Well, I think that there is a legitimate need to legally /read/ open
source data, and Real does seem to be attempting to offer that. That
/is/ important and is valuable- if I can't legally play a DVD or Real or
WMA, I'm going to have a hard time getting Free Software onto the
desktops of millions of people, which is something I think I and most
GNOME hackers would love to see. So in that sense, Real is offering
something of value, and we need to be open to any possibility that would
allow us to incorporate that work into our Free Desktop. [I too am
opposed, in general, to defaulting to _writing_ any closed formats,
though it would seem unlikely that we'd get a read-only solution from
anyone.]

Past that, Lee, Rob, others- I agree with everything else that you and
Andrew have said, pretty much- I think they sum things up pretty well,
with regards to community licensing and motivation. Real would do well
to read them :) If we don't have an (L)GPL-compatible stack, we might as
well go home, and that includes whatever solution is the long term
solution for the media stack.

Luis