MJ Ray wrote:
As I mentioned, media players like mplayer and VLC seem to play the useful audio/video content in most cases, so there is a real alternative for the most useful content.
Useful alternatives for content creators, maybe, but not much use to content users until the creators shift.
In any case, something like Flash has a wide range of uses for which it is better suited than many video formats (in the same way that vactor graphics formats are better suited than .png/.jpeg to many applications). That's an argument for a well supported open standard in that area, not for Flash, however.
I'm not one to "blame" Macromedia for this though. The readiness of people to accept something which is free (as in beer) when it is far from free (as in speech) provided Macromedia with an opportunity to make money, and I'm not naive enough to suggest that Macromedia should have walked away from this. There should have been a much stronger push for open standards and a refusal to accept a closed standard like this, which would never have happened in the closed world of IE domination. We should perhaps be grateful at least that is not a Microsoft format (otherwise there wouldn't even be a Linux proprietary player for it).
This is all a very good argument for the distinction between beer and speech freedoms, which will come as no surprise to people on this list I am sure.
<RANT>To take this one step sideways: If there'd been a requirement for the various government IT schemes to be modular systems with clearly defined open specifications for the interactions between the systems, regardless of whether the software vendors chose to use proprietary systems to implement those standards, would we have seen the various wide ranging IT farces of recent years? Would it not have promoted choice and competition, and wouldn't it have given an opportunity for FOSS to prove itself on a level playing field? Surely standards like SMTP, HTTP, FTP, XML etc (not to mention TCP/IP etc) have proven themselves sufficiently that the idea of defining a clear and open interaction between systems should be common-sense by now. Instead of pushing petitions to move government to open source software, we as a community should be pushing open standards above everything else. Open standards do not exclude closed corporations (Exchange and Outlook, Internet Explorer and IIS, etc), so closed corporates have less to complain about.</RANT>