Re: [Gnash-dev] 2nd try: How can Internet Archive flash script pick codec to use?

[Russ Nelson]

Yeah, I'm pissed off.

Bastiaan Jacques writes:
 > On Sat, 27 Sep 2008, Russ Nelson wrote:
 > 
 > > Benjamin Otte writes:
 > > > And the only feature that Flash video formats don't give you yet is
 > > > Freedom. But if you care about Freedom, you don't use Flash,
 > >
 > > I'm sure you didn't mean to write this.  Would you retract it?
 > 
 > It makes perfect sense to me.

Well, I thought that Benjamin (Company on IRC) didn't mean to impugn
my motives, but after chatting on IRC, he apparently did.  My reply to
him is "well fuck you too, asshole."  Apparently he's a free software
zealot who doesn't understand the difference between strategy and
tactics.

If you want to help people, then you help them.  You don't argue that
what they're trying to do is wrong, and that they should do something
different.  For far too long free software zealots argued with people
rather than helping them.

The goal here (or, rather, my goal) is to free up the SWF standard so
that Adobe can't use it to gain proprietary advantage.  The way we do
that is *we* make free changes to the SWF standard.  Adobe can
implement them or suffer.  In order to do that, we need to gain
adoption of software that complies with the free standard.  Benjamin
obviously doesn't care about freedom because he doesn't want to free
up the SWF standard.

I suppose it's fine if Benjamin only cares about himself -- if he only
cares that *he* has the ability to run free software (HTML5 / <embed>
of Ogg/Theora).  Me, I'm not that selfish.  I want other people to
have the same freedom that I have.  People aren't going to abandon
SWF just because Benjamin declares it Not Free.  Running around, and
jumping up and down and proclaiming that some piece of software isn't
Free, has worked as well as it has always worked: not at all.

SWF isn't going away.  It's important to its users that we free it up
for them.  If you don't want to do that, then you're on the side of
proprietary software vendors.

(Note: If this pisses you off, Benjamin, then understand that I am
merely reflecting back on you the same judgement you made of me.
Don't like it?  Don't do it.  The Golden Rule: "do not do unto others
as you would not be done unto yourself".  Since I want Benjamin to
apologize to me and retract what he said, then I will be the first to
offer to retract what I've said about him here, and apologize for ever
doubting him.  But let's get the order straight: he insulted first and
he can apologize first.)

-- 
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