You're right -- Adresm's edit fixes a lot of it I think
Thanks Andresm, I used your edits
it might be due to english not being my first language, but your letter seems
a little confusing to me. It sound too technical, and not very to the
point. But maybe for a english speaking person it might look fine
My try to make it short: open with a sentence with what you want so that they
can read clearly what the letter is about. Your choice of subject line is
important as well as it might be the only thing they see. I am not sure, but
they might come back with something like ogg not being viewable
Hey -- thanks for following up. I got frustrated editing the letter before;
I decided to forget about it for a while and try again with a clear head. I
did -- here's what it looks like now. I'm going downtown next week; I'm
thinking of dropping it off then. As always, I'll appreciate any
Hey, sorry to bump an old thread, but I was really interested in knowing how
it all turned out. Muhammed, did you send the letters? What were the answers
they gave you?
Thanks.
Let's just wait now for a decent successor to come.. Daala we call you out
from the Earth's mantle! =P
http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo4.shtml
Thanks for your comments Icaro and MB; I didn't understand the patent issue
before you explained it. This is how I understand it now:
Some proprietary formats work on both proprietary sofware and free software.
Some proprietary formats work on proprietary software only. Using free
Thanks Tral, I definitely will
I don't want to advocate for a seamless proprietary experience ... losing the
paragraph about free sw risks that I think.
I'll post my third draft. I don't mean to drag this out; I just want to give
this a fighting chance.
Draft 3: Is this too wordy? Let me know if there's anything I can lose or
correct.
Toronto Police Service,
Please provide electronic criminal justice disclosure in free formats. By
“free” here, I mean certain freedoms, and not price. Free formats are
fully documented. Adopting free
You might consider softening the opening sentence. Despite the word please,
it might sound aggressive, especially given how many people sometimes
insincerely use the word please as a substitute for hey, asshole.
Maybe you could open with something like, I'd like to raise concern over the
In my opinion CSS is confuse, can be the style language. You can say Content
Scramble System (CSS) or Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).
Remember: the format isn't proprietary. Is encumbered by patents. [3] And
free software (VLC, Gstreamer [Totem, Rhythmbox], MPlayer, etc) can play
You're right, that's a good point.
Let's say I drop the GPL paragraph. Without it, the remaining concerns are
(1) free market, and (2) platform-exclusive support.
Could the Crown choose a proprietary format, that is licensed to many
companies, and meet those two concerns? If so, what's
No patent-encumbered format can possibly fix those problems, but someone who
is ignorant might think that one does. h.264, for example, is widely used, so
its status as a patent-encumbered format is invisible to any user of a
proprietary system.
Here's my second draft. Please let me know if it's missing anything, or if I
can say something better. I'll attach the Wikimedia Commons' File Types
document to this letter (the File Types doc that lembas posted).
I'm reluctant to use the name Linux, because peoples' already-held ideas
Thanks guys, your comments are really helpful. I'll read your articles
before I do a second draft.
Photos should always be .jpg but images can be .png, .svg and probably quite
a few other formats. Here's some likely useful info since Wikimedia runs on
free software https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_types
The GNU project suggests calling these operating systems GNU/Linux.
I noticed that the criminal justice system in my town works with proprietary
video formats. I'm thinking of asking the government to use free formats
instead.
I have some questions -- but here's some background info first:
The Toronto Police Service collects video evidence from
For video, there's also Matroska. For audio, don't forget Opus.
It's important to note that while PDF itself is free, some PDF files created
by Adobe's software have DRM that makes them only work in Adobe Reader.
That's no good.
All patent-free formats works in proprietary system with free software.
Firefox (Opus, Theora, Vorbis, VP8)
Thunderbird (IMAP, SMTP, XMPP)
Evince (PDF, Djvu)
LibreOffice (ODT, ODS, ODP...)
VLC (Opus, FLAC, VP8, Theora, Vorbis)
SMplayer (Theora, Vorbis, VP8...)
GIMP (XCF, SVG, JPG, PNG, TIF,
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