1. Yes, Stallman would most certainly permit you transcoding the video – this would be your personal choice.
2. I believe transcoding the video to watch it would fall under fair use, and so not covered by copyright, so nobody would be able to deny you this anyway, but I am not a lawyer.
Fair use is only a concept in copyright. The problem with MPEG-4 is patents. You would need to look at the MPEG-LA's licensing to determine if you can encode it yourself.
This comment contains cognitive dissonance in the form of a blaming statement, which is probably why you are being DV'd. Stallman's ideologies can be viewed as political ideologies, which by definition are about people wanting to live their lives with certain types of freedom, mostly attributed to information they generate.
Your statement puts itself into conflict with those who choose this ideology because you claim it's a radio-button decision that forces choice between 'people' and 'personal information ownership'. It's not.
You haven't actually stated a position, but merely made an ambiguous observation, so I can't disagree with it. You may want to parse your comment again.
By the way, I think you're being DV'd for not adding substance to the discussion. I'm now guilty of the same thing, so feel free to hit that upside-down triangle :-)
To paraphrase Nick Fury: When Stallman says freedom, I kind of think he means the other thing. Taking away one choice of video format is not freedom. Telling people to upload photos of him only to specific websites is not freedom. Telling people who own a specific device not to take pictures of him at all is not freedom. Choosing a free software license that forces others to release changes they make is not freedom. Forcing "freedom" onto people is not freedom.
Its more about freedom of using rather than creating.
You want to create something that can be used by anyone without restrictions from patents, etc. -- so necessarily that imposes limits on what you can create (in this case no mp4).
I think you can look at GPL in a similar way: it is more about protecting the user than the developer: it imposes restrictions on the developer that are necesasry to ensure the freedom of the user(s).
> [...] so necessarily that imposes limits on what you can create (in this case no mp4).
This is a bad example. I guess you could just encode the video twice, no?
Your GPL example I like a lot though; I never heard that argument before. One problem I have with it is that the line between users and developers can be a little blurry, or, in my case doesn't exist at all. I'm also not sure why you'd need the GPL license to ensure the users' freedom. Say OpenOffice is MIT licensed. I'm a developer, I fork it and make changes that I don't publish because I don't have to. How does that relate to your (the user's) freedom? I can take OpenOffice away from you, or un-MIT-license it, or whatever.
The GPL, or copyleft, does not require you to release your changes. 10:31 in the video: "And they can also offer it to the rest of the public, if they wish."
It doesn't matter whether you're just using a program, or also hacking away at it, being a developer/programmer means you're also using it, i.e. means you're also a user of the program.
So compared to users, developers don't lose anything, except for the fact that they are not allowed to turn a program into an instrument of power over other users. I don't know why you say ideology > people above. If anything, copyleft really favours the people as the majority of people are not programmers.
Even for programmers, copyleft has incentive for them to contribute since it's a guarantee that their investment into the program will not be 'wasted', i.e. used in proprietary software (if the programmer believes in the morality of free software that is, obviously it can go both ways).
> "I'm also not sure why you'd need the GPL license to ensure the users' freedom."
If it's licensed under MIT, you can simply continue development under a proprietary license at anytime (and typically you would stop distributing the source, only distributing the binary). Eventually, the unmaintained MIT licensed version will likely become useless (assuming it remains unmaintained/no development), and because the latest version of the program is proprietary, the user loses the freedom they once had when using this program. The GPL essentially forbids this in order to prevent that from happening.
You are right about the video, demanding to have it available in at least one free codec would suffice.
About the software: Lets say you stop updating your fork after some time, and it fails to run on a newer system, but it is something that someone really wants to use.
If he has the source code available he can rebuild it / port it / fix bugs in it and continue to use it even after the original developer abandons it.
A somewhat similar idea: I can still run, change, apply security updates for Linux software on a very old laptop (until the hardware eventually breaks) that runs mostly FOSS.
But I can't do that on an Android phone that uses proprietary camera/phone/gps/etc. libraries because after some point the vendor stops supporting it and without the source code it is hard to make it run on newer versions of the OS.
Had the license been GPL I could've asked for the source code and keep using it. An MIT license would allow more freedom for the vendor (to link/modify use in proprietary applications), but it doesn't require distributing source code so it provides less freedom for the end-user.
> I'm a developer, I fork it and make changes that I don't publish because I don't have to.
That's all fine, because you're only exercising Freedoms 0 and 1. The MIT/BSD licenses and many others are sufficient for these. As soon as you come to exercising Freedom 2 and 3 though, users of the code are susceptible to losing all 4 freedoms for that software. It's at the whim of any of the middle-men distributing or modifying it as to whether any of the freedoms are preserved for all users.
He is not taking away any choices. He just makes choices. A result of freedom. He is not forcing it onto anybody. He's just practising it.
Freedom is not a zero-sum game, but a optimisation problem. Take some people the right to parasite other peoples work is somehow lowering their freedom, but it gives much more freedom to the end user. It's up to you to decide what is more important.
But this debate already happened a millions times and I don't think this is going to be fruitful.
> He is not taking away any choices. He just makes choices.
Well, he literally made the choice to take away once of our choices. But you're right, that is a result of his personal freedom (and I don't mind that).
> [...] it gives much more freedom to the end user.
I couldn't disagree more, but that's okay I guess.
> But this debate already happened a millions times and I don't think this is going to be fruitful.
That depends or your definition of fruitful. I never head your opinion on it before, and now I did. I also think it's a good idea to remind the next generation of developers that we don't have all the answers yet.
I think the point is, freedom is also not free unless you have the right to restrict yourself, with or without option. Freedom includes the right to impose ones own personal restrictions, and not have it imposed upon you from external agency.
You aren't wrong, but there are different conceptions of the word "freedom". Stallman explains the specific values of the word "freedom" related to Free Software at the beginning of the talk.
So he is advocating not using things that restrict people's freedom (in the Free Software sense).
It is similar to the bit about licenses near the end of the talk - Stallman says that an MIT/BSD license allows some people to alter the source and transform it into proprietary code and therefore they would reduce the (Free Software) freedoms of a user.
EDIT: Yes. He starts with that.