Macromedia Applies For OSI Certification

mpawlo writes "As reported by Greplaw, Macromedia, the company behind Flash-technology and more, has applied for open source certification of one of its licenses. The Macromedia license is based on the IBM Public License. You can see the Application for certification as well as the The Macromedia licence."

Comments

good

[Flashbuster 2000]

Now maybe my flash plugin will work well. Every time I view some flash thing, it goes WAY too fast. If Macromedia appreciates open source maybe it won't write shit plugins for open source OSes. This may just be my thing - this didn't happen with Red Hat 7.1, but it does now with Mandrake 8.1.

Re:good

[BitHive]

So, the same plugin is quirky under one Linux distribution, but works fine under another. . . must be the plugin!

Re:good

[Blue Booger]

My Flash player works OK, except on remote X displays. It has been identified by the Mozilla guys as a bug in the plugin. There is a petition online over at the Linux Terminal Server Project page to try to convince Macromedia that enough people are affected to fix the issue.

Re:good

[dungeness]

Now maybe my flash pluggin will stay borken. In a better world, it would play in a picosecond, and I'd never even know it was there.

Doesn't have to make source code available

[mikosullivan]

If they don't distribute the source code, the following clause pretty much means that the software isn't open source:

clarify that if Macromedia includes its own open source in its products, Macromedia does not have to state in its documentation where the source code version of the open source material is made available,

The availability of source code is pretty much what makes it, y'know, open source. That means making the source code available with the compiled code, which in practice usually means giving a URL for download rather than distributing a mega-ton of course code with the compiled code.

Re:Doesn't have to make source code available

[Anonymous Coward]

They will probably just distribute a 'reference implementation', much the same as Fraunhofer did with mp3 encoding/decoding. That is, unoptimizied but easy to see what is going on. They make their money on having a good Flash 'encoder' anyway, so ..

Re:Doesn't have to make source code available

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately that doesn't necessarily mean that it will be easy to create a GPL (not just open source) Flash encoder/decoder. Just look at how long it took to finish LAME!

Also mp3 is different 'cos you have to pay license fees. With Flash there is no such limitation.

Re:Doesn't have to make source code available

[einhverfr]

Hmmm... I can think of many projects like the production versions of Cygwin (www.cygwin.com) which are not released. RedHat only releases the development versions without expensive support contracts (although the production versions are, iirc, still GPL'd).

Re:Doesn't have to make source code available

[Russ Nelson]

Licenses are for *other* parties to use your copyrighted works. Macromedia has just made changes to the license to clarify that they are not bound by the license by which you use their work.
-russ

Re:Doesn't have to make source code available

[JohanV]

I don't see the problem. All it says is that if they have released product X under the Macromedia Open Source License and take part of product X and put it in product Y they do not need to tell you they copied the code from product X and where to get the source of product X. But it only applies to their own contributions, so if somebody else contributed a little bit to X as well and that part is to be included in product Y, they still need to include it.
It is just an assertion that their own licence is not used to force them to opensource more as they want.

To me, it looks like they just want to make sure their licence is not viral. And that is not a problem for OSI certification, judging by the fact that the BSD licence is OSI certified.

Re:Doesn't have to make source code available

[Arandir]

And exactly how is this different from the GPL? Where in the GPL does it state that the original author must specify where the source code located? Licenses are restrictions upon the licensee, not the licensor. They are not, and have never been, two way streets.

Re:Doesn't have to make source code available

[eckes]

The clause in question is included in most commercially seeded open source licenses. The MPL was one of the fiest with it. The idea is, that the company who opens up the source code still has the right to use it for properitary closed source products. And in addition to that, all patches to the free and open version can be used by the company.

In fact if you publish source under the GPL you are free to use that source in another commercial product and do not need to open up the source. But as soon as you accept paptches, you cant include those patches in your closed product, cause they will be under the GPL and you do not have the copyright.

Thats why you see licenses like the MPL. In fact it means a company treats its source base against patches. This can be "fair" or "unfair" to the community, but it is OSI compliant, since it does not restrict the open branch of a product. It only grants additional rights to the original licensor.

Greetings
Bernd

Re:Doesn't have to make source code available

[Dwonis]

Licenses are for *other* parties to use your copyrighted works.

Licenses are for other parties to distribute copies of your copyrighted works. Use has nothing to do with copyright, although some parties would have you believe otherwise.

Re:Doesn't have to make source code available

[Arandir]

In fact if you publish source under the GPL you are free to use that source in another commercial product and do not need to open up the source. But as soon as you accept paptches, you cant include those patches in your closed product, cause they will be under the GPL and you do not have the copyright.

If you require submissions to have their copyright assigned to you, you can do whatever you wish with them. Requiring assignments of copyright is not unheard of. In fact, it is policy for the FSF.

I agree that the clause in question is very one sided, and I hope Macromedia does not insist upon it. But I don't see that it will disqualify the license as either Open Source or Free. It will just end up being another unused license since no one will want to contribute to projects under it.

Re:This should be refused as a matter of principle

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. Flash plugin files are practically a standard on the most popular platforms for web browsing, in a similar way to how TCP/IP became a standard despite non-approval by ISO.

Indeed, most recent versions of IE come with Shockwave Flash already included. And as IE is used by about 80% of web browsing users, if that isn't a standard I don't know what is!

Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll be nice to have the source code for Flash out there. Maybe someone will whip up a tool that will let the rest of us make Flash animations without having to shell out a couple Gs?

Maybe an open source Shockwave plugin won't run like molasses on Linux...

Re:Great news

[puto]

There is one called Swish http://www.swishzone.com It is like 50 bucks and you can do really good things with it. Great movies, make your text effects. And it exports to swf format. You can also import flash..... Check out the animations there. Hope those guys got bandwidth over there. But then again the thought of having been the cause of the /. effect is making me feel 'naughty'. Puto

Prove your point

[Anonymous Coward]

I run HP-UX on my desktop at work. Oddly enough, I can build Mozilla and Konqueror for HP-UX on PA-RISC, but I can't seem to find a Flash plugin. Care to help?

Re:Prove your point

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that I did say 'most popular platforms'. Mozilla on HP-UX isn't a popular platform for web browsing, therefore I have no point to prove.

Re:Prove your point

[xtremex]

Not popular? Well, if they made the plugin open source, then the HP-UX user has the FREEDOM to compile his own binary.

Re:Prove your point

[Anonymous Coward]

your mother is a whore and she likes the rough stuff

So what are the goods?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are they licensing with this?

Hopeully this is a plus

[PhreakinPenguin]

Not sure what all this is going to mean in the end, but Macromedia does make great web development tools. I would love to see Dreamweaver MX or Flash MX end up as Open Source sometime soon. But this is more than likely a pipe dream.

"Pipe Dream": When someone is smoking the pipe too much and seriously believes that something will happen.

Re:Hopeully this is a plus

[dthable]

That it is. It's more likely that a native Flash MX plugin for Linux will appear that uses a lot of other open source libraries. Besides the development tools, where else would Macromedia make money?

Re:Hopeully this is a plus

[Technician]

Just maybe I can finaly get a player that comes up with a play button instead of running all the force fed flash advertisements by default.

The lack of basic end user controls to shut the junk off is the only reason I removed Macromedia from my system. It's the only way to make it "off" by default and in many cases the only to stop flash from playing.

The noise to signal ratio by advertisers and the disabling of player controls (unstoppable) blew my fuse. I won't drive a car without brakes, my media player should have the same level of control. No stop and go buttons killed Macromedia for my system.

MS may claim 80% of systems shipped with the player installed, but how many systems have it ripped out afterwards?

Flash

[RageMachine]

Untill Flash is at a point to where they write versions for ALL platforms instead of giving M$ platforms at version 6.0, while all the others remain at 5.0, then I don't think they should be given ANY credit for being open source advocates.

Re:Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm probably going to be modded -1, Troll for saying this, but this is what I see based on observational evidence ..

Basically, it makes sound business sense for them to concentrate their resources on building the best tools for the Windows platform, for a number of reasons:

First, there are more Windows users than any other OS, so it makes sense to make software for this platform based on number of users alone.

Secondly, Windows users are more likely to pay for the software, as they are used to paying for software, whereas the Unix mindset is to download source for free and compile it.

And thirdly, Windows is more standardised across versions than the various different flavours of Unix are, for example. So there only has to be one build.

It is quite clear why they only pay lip service to other OSes - money!

Re:Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

I work only on Unix boxen where I work.

Why should I care about the Windows world?
What has it done for me? Nothing.

Im interested in corps doing things for ME,
and people in my field. Not for majoratiy
of people who use an OS from a monopoly undergoing
Anti-Trust charges, and clearly violated the law.

How would you like it if paper companys only made
paper for those who make weed, and not
cigarettes? It wouln't be a nice world for
tomacco smokers would it?

Making products, and selling them to criminals
should be illegal.

Re:Flash

[justsomebody]

I'll be the first to mod you down.

First, you're correct.

"Windows users are more likely to pay for the software, as they are used to paying for software"

God, I hope you're joking at that. Let me think. Almost everybody has Photoshop installed, how many copies Adobe actually sold? Take Autocad. Same. ......... If you'd look at percentage of bought software, you'd see that Windows users are 80% or more using pirated software. Companys will buy software, because they must not because they want. If some company would use Beos (and depend on it), then they would buy software for Beos. At least all companys I know off.

"So there only has to be one build"
That's probably why my bank accounting software doesn't work on XP probably (worked on 2000). Yeah, I don't own 2000 anymore, it came bundled with my notebook, which I've sold. New one has XP pro, which is a real piece of expensive shit. Even though new notebook is xt6200 (p4 1,6,512MB, CDRW), whole thing is slower than XE3 (p3 850, 512MB, DVD, next one XE3 933,512MB, DVD, XP HE was a real piece of crap, and I replaced him as soon as possible) ever was, and yes I've disabled all extra desktop features, and yes I've disabled services I don't need. Where is one version of yours. Apart from bank software, I use another 3.1 Win software which isn't working also. So off with XP, bought VMWare for Linux, installed 98 and now everything is working.

Offtopic:
Linux works like a charm and snappy, when setup finished everything worked (except I had to do ln -s /dev/dvd /dev/cdrom on my own) just in case someone would consider about buying a notebook.

Re:Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

we are currently working on the Flash 6 player for linux.

mike chambers

mesh@macromedia.com

Re:Flash

[cpeterso]

Do you know that both the Flash Player and the Flash Authoring Tool are also released for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X? See here: Macromedia Flash MX System Requirements

Re:Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Your analogy is flawed; not only is tobacco a lot more popular than weed, but rolling papers can be used for either.

Re:Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I wasn't joking. As a counter-example, just look at the gaming market under Linux - it flopped. And why? Because Linux users expect to get them for free, so they don't pay.

On the other hand, the Windows platform is a very popular gaming platform, where people will actually go out and spend a few quid on a game.

As for your last point, yes, there are some compatibility issues with some programs. I didn't claim Windows was perfect in this respect. However, to be fair, most programs work without bother. Also, the MSDN documentation for each function clearly states which OSes it is compatible with. Obviously something which uses undocumented Windows 3.1 hacks isn't going to run very well under XP over a decade later. But most well-written programs will.

Re:Flash

[byran lei]

>No, I wasn't joking. As a counter-example, just look at the gaming
>market under Linux - it flopped. And why? Because Linux users expect
>to get them for free, so they don't pay.
>
>
Totally and utterly wrong. The reason the "Gaming" market under Linux "flopped" is because there never was one. Most Linux users abandoned the PC Gaming Market *YEARS* ago in favor of the Console Market. Some of us were DOS gamers who never made the jump to buying and playing games under Windows mostly because of the bloated system requirements of the Windows Games and not wanting to deal with people (cheaters) like you anymore. There are number of reasons why there's little interest in PC Gaming among Linux users and most of them have nothing to do with not wanting to spend money.

Re:Flash

[kg4czo]

How about a Linux version of Flash? That would be really cool! Linux has already proven itself in the 3D rendering market, now how about Flash too! Woohoo! Jay

Re:Flash

[Lemmy Caution]

Even if only 20% of the Windows users are paying for their software (a claim which, of course, came flying straight from your anus), the market that Adobe and just about everyone else cares about - seats in the enterprise - are going to be much higher. And even if that weren't the case, 20% of the Windows market is still far larger than 90% of the unix/Open Source market.

Re:Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Operating systems don't have to be a religion, you know. If you really need to run Flash that much, get Windows XP or something. Really, it's only an OS - applications are much more important.

(Probably going to get modded down as Flamebait or something for this, even though it isn't. Oh well.)

Re:Flash

[Phroggy]

Untill Flash is at a point to where they write versions for ALL platforms instead of giving M$ platforms at version 6.0, while all the others remain at 5.0, then I don't think they should be given ANY credit for being open source advocates.

Since when does open source mean non-Windows platforms?

Perhaps if Flash were released as open source, members of the community would help port the latest version to other platforms faster than Macromedia can do it themselves?

Re:Flash

[ahfoo]

Hey Mike Baby!
I'm pretty sure I talked to you on the forums over there at Macromedia. The AhFoo from Taiwan who was complaining about his missing dongle for using Chinese Authorware systems.
Anyway, I this is not the place to be chatting about missing dongles but it is the place to talk aobut GNULinux and Macromedia with a real live Macromedia rep.
I just wanted to let you know that the Authorware runtime works fabulously under Wine. I was shocked and I knew that the people over there on the corporate hosted News server didn't want to hear about it as they're decidedly windows centric. I came to that conclusion after getting flamed pretty hard for bringing up the codeweavers plug-in for the Authorware web player and general talk of making a real runtime for GNULinux. Anyhow, just thought I'd pass that along --Authorware and Director apps seem to work awesome under Wine so Macromedia is now the leading Icon/Flow Control based RichMedia Authoring platform for GNULinux! Yee haw. Tell the school districts all about it. No need to upgrade those Windows licenses to leverage existing courseware. Isn't this great news?! You folks hopped the fence without even trying.
I hope you good people at Macromedia do a fine job of spreading this great news to clients who might be in charge of spending the taxpayers money like the school district that you send your products to every year.
Keep up the good work Mike. And log in next time!

Acid test

[AirLace]

The acid test of any license is whether it's DFSG free and can thus be included in Debian, Mandrake and other Free Software distributions. Groups like Apple and the DivX team have been known to release purportedly "open source" software under look-but-don't-touch style licenses. Of note is the Darwin Streaming Server from Apple which, while passing the OSI open-source definition is not actually Free Software because it demands that you hand over all changes even if you don't distribute the software (you can see why this is a crazy notion).

Nevertheless, Macromedia has some cool technologies and I can see them being widely implemented if there are truly free and complete implementations.

Re:Acid test

[Phexro]

In other words, Open Source Software is not Free Software. Thanks, Einstein.

How is that insightful?

Re:Acid test

[Russ Nelson]

If you never deploy APSL'ed software, you don't have to publish your source code. If you give it to a bunch of people -- even if they all work for you -- then you have to publish the source code. How is this different in spirit from the GPL?
-russ

Re:Acid test

[MindStalker]

As long as you keep GPL code inhouse you don't have to publish it. In fact, even if you sell GPL software to the world, you only have to give the source to the people who buy it. APSL says you have to publish it to the world if you give it to anyone. That is a lessend freedom, as you don't have the freedom to keep your program modification secret among your friend. (You can do that of course, but its not legal)

Re:Acid test

[jmd!]

> The acid test of any license is whether it's DFSG free

The OSI definition is the same as Debian's. Welcome to the Open Source world. Please refrain from posting in our forums. Thank you.

> while passing the OSI open-source definition is not actually Free Software

Of course it isn't. Open Source and Free Software are two entirely different things. They're not applying for Stallman's holy blessing, just for Open Source certification. See welcome message and instructions above.

Re:Acid test

[Carl]

The spirit of the GPL is that the user should have the freedom when they receive the software, the APSL makes it sound like the distributor of the software (Apple) should have all the freedom. This is a small but crucial difference in attitude.

(GPL - if you distribute make sure others receive freedom. APSL - If I distribute I should have more freedom.)

You might want to read the very good discussion on why the APSL is not a free software license:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html

Note that there are a lot of good Free Software licensing lessons to be learned by reading:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy .html#Lice nsingFreeSoftware

Re:Acid test

[HiThere]

If you never deploy APSL'ed software, you don't have to publish your source code. If y...

I don't know the APSL license. I do know that I've seen licenses that claim that you need to submit to them anything that you build using their tool. Even if it's a buggy version of 'Hello World' that you don't want anyone else to know you were ever associated with. I doubt that the license would ever be enforced that way, but that's what it said.

Re:Acid test

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to call me names. If you can't resist being so vulgar, then please,
add me to your foes list and never reply to my posts.

Re:Acid test

[Russ Nelson]

I've read it. I don't agree with it. You can argue quite reasonably that the APSL increases the amount of open source software because it requires that any distribution -- even in-house -- requires publication of the source code.

What is important about the freedom to program? That you be free to modify and redistribute. But the GPL forces a requirement on those who would modify. The GPL imposes a cost that you must redistribute source to anyone who gets a binary. The APSL imposes a cost that you must redistribute source to anyone if you deploy a binary. The difference is that you have the freedom to make proprietary changes to your code. Why is RMS arguing that this is a good thing??? Proprietary is suddenly good? What happened to him?
-russ

Re:Acid test

[vectro]

OSI: Open Source International.
DFSG: Debian Free Software guidelines.

The OSI definition is the same as Debian's
Open Source and Free Software are two entirely different things.

See the contradiction? In fact, if you'd done your homework a bit more you'd see that the DFSG are not the same as the OSI rules. Debian's rules are stricter, which is why the Apple license doesn't qualify.

And please lose the condescending attitude. It dosen't suit you.

Re:Acid test

[jmd!]

> OSI: Open Source International

Speaking of homework... it's "Initiative".

> DFSG: Debian Free Software guidelines.

Quite meaningless, since "Free Software" isn't a trademark, and they aren't using RMS's definition.

> you'd see that the DFSG are not the same as the OSI rules

If that's the case, then Debian has changed their rules. OSI's definition was an exact copy of Debians to begin with. All that was changed ware references to 'Debian'. It says this much on opensource.org. I don't follow Debian enough to know if they've changed a word or two in DFSG recently, it's a useless OS as far as enterprise is concerned, and therefor useless to me.

Re:Acid test

[Anonymous Coward]

This is correct, but it is a long shot from being "look but don't touch", as the original poster states.

Keep in mind the GPL isn't exactly virginal on this point, as it makes absolutely no clarification whatsoever as to the difference between a lone programmer and a corporation--I.E., if a corp develops something GPLed inhouse, and a programmer gets pissed and just before quitting releases this inhouse package to the world in violation of his contract, does the world have the right to use that package, or did the lone programmer not have the right to redistribute the package because he was not himself a licensee? Everyone seems to have a slightly different opinion on this point.

The GPL stating that individuals may keep their own, nondistributed work private is a good, important feature. However it is tainted by failure to clarify whether, if groups wish to keep their own, nondistributed work private, they have any redress or legal ability to keep that private if the source code is stolen and redistributed.

Re:Acid test

[Phexro]

"If you can't resist being so vulgar..."

I direct you to the definition of the word vulgar:
"conspicuously and tastelessly indecent; 'coarse language'; 'a revoltingly gross expletive';"

Calling you Einstein is not vulgar, it's sarcastic. Just to make things perfectly clear, I will present you with a practical example of vulgarity:

"Thanks for sorting that out, you fucking prat. Gee, Open Source Software isn't the same fucking thing as Free Software. I never would have fucking guessed. Jesus Christ, did you win your brain in a farting competition, or did it come with a box of fucking Cracker Jacks? Did you have problems with addition in elementary school, or were you expelled for your rankling malodorous fetor before you had the chance to learn?"

Let's hope you can make a clear distinction next time. In case you are confused, this comment is condescending, with a dash of vulgarity.

hum... waht percentage of the sources ?

[selderrr]

I guess it's pretty unlikely that they'll open up all of it : a lot of flash code is part of the Freehand and Director code base too. And I can't imagine they'll let anyone copy from that. They've got a hard time getting Adobe out of their way in the lawsuits.

My guess is that they hope for a cheap linux port of flash. But they again : if they keep a ton of code under the wraps in the form of a win32 lib, it all doesn't make much sense.

Probably they just want to ride the opensource train in case it 'might just catch on'. Big corps are always late on the catching on part.

Re:hum... waht percentage of the sources ?

[spage]

a lot of Flash code is part of the FreeHand and Director code base too. ... [Adobe lawsuit]

No. The Flash Player (the "plug-in") is (relatively) lean and mean, I doubt it shares any code with those authoring tools. The Flash authoring tool is a big application that runs on Mac and Win** with, in the new MX version, a common User Interface.

** How many Linux/UNIX users would pay how much $$$ for the authoring tool? I doubt there's any financial incentive to develop UNIX versions of the authoring tools.

Re:hum... waht percentage of the sources ?

[JohanV]

Why do you assume this is about Flash when the person submitting the email to the discusiion list is working on CFML Language Development?
Do you know anything the general public does not know, or are you just jumping to conclusions? (Understandable, the wish is the father of the thought.)

Re:hum... waht percentage of the sources ?

[Beliskner]

Not exactly, Onstream didn't do a cheap linux port of their driver. If they create trash it looks bad for the company. Right now every company can just remove Flash like Micro$oft removed JRE from XP. Macromedia wants to change this by OSI. This way only stupid browsers won't support it, like Opera pre-alpha saying "Yeah we support HTML 4.01 w3c specification but we don't render IFRAMEs." It's like IFRAMEs are part of the HTML 4.01 spec, if you can't render them, then your browser is trash, simple as that. OSI compliance moves the locus of responsibility.

Re:hum... waht percentage of the sources ?

[surfimp]

** How many Linux/UNIX users would pay how much $$$ for the authoring tool? I doubt there's any financial incentive to develop UNIX versions of the authoring tools.

I dunno, I paid something like +/-$150 for the upgrade from Flash 5 to Flash MX, and I'd surely have done the same if I could've purchased FMX for Linux.

Shoot, Flash & Dreamweaver are the only reasons I still have to have a dual boot system, now that Evolution, OpenOffice and Mozilla are all to 1.0.

I'd buy it in a heartbeat, assuming it was priced the same as the Windows and Mac versions.

Re:hum... waht percentage of the sources ?

[Anonymous Coward]

OSI compliance moves the locus of responsibility.

Indeed, grasshoper...

hey

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps this means we can stop sayign "Vector graphics, schmecter graphics, it's proprietary, and therefore evil, and therefore shouldn't be used, q.e.d."

Re:hey

[A Non-MS Coward]

Flash isn't the be-all/end-all of vector graphics. There's also SVG, an xml-based open standard for vector graphics. It's too bad the open source offerings for it are lagging behind the commercial ones though. I don't even think they had a head start on that one, or am I wrong?

Re:hey

[Anonymous Coward]

If there are no reasonably workable implementations, then Flash is the be-all and end-all of vector graphics. For now, at least. Standards need to be implemented, otherwise what is the point?

Re:hey

[Anonymous Coward]

SVG rendering is very very slow. All people here talking about transforming the one format to the other, and back, and whatever are simply wrong.

SVG format is too much verbose, so the .svgz format is already bound to replace SVG, while SVG itself is going to other directions (1.1, mobile, ...).

Oh NO!!!!

[ewoods]

That was submitted by:
Tom Harwood
Macromedia Server Products
CFML Language Development

Does this mean that they are going to try to pollute the world with more CFML? That is not a real language and will never perform or live up to expectations of a real language. I hate Cold Fusion!

Re:Oh NO!!!!

[buckminster]

Uh . . . explain your rant please. I've seen just as much bad ASP, PHP and JSP as I've seen bad CFML. It's the coder not the code.

Re:Oh NO!!!!

[X_Caffeine]

1) Cold Fusion MX is now essentially JSP, with chunks of code executed by CFML tags.

2) Bluedragon is a new Java CFML-compatible web application server, promises better performance than CF.

3) I've often heard of Cold Fusion that it makes the easy incredibly easy and makes the difficult impossible. More importantly, like the previous post said, it's the coder, not the language.

4) blow it out your ass

Re:Oh NO!!!!

[cpeterso]

I've often heard of Cold Fusion that it makes the easy incredibly easy and makes the difficult impossible.

Makes the difficult impossible? That sounds like a bug, not a feature..

Re:Oh NO!!!!

[jchristopher]

Does this mean that they are going to try to pollute the world with more CFML? That is not a real language and will never perform or live up to expectations of a real language. I hate Cold Fusion!

That's right, 'real nerds' hate ColdFusion. Why? Not because it sucks, or it's slow... they hate it because it's too easy!

The .asp people I know HATE ColdFusion. When pressed for more information, the truth comes out - they hate it because it makes things TOO EASY, allowing 'non-nerds' to develop data driven web pages. Lord knows we can't have that!

Just admit it, the real reason you hate ColdFusion is that some guy can write the same app you'd write in Perl or .jsp in a third as many lines and that scares the shit out of you. It drives you nuts that someone without a Computer Science degree can build web applications too, doesn't it?

I can't say I blame you, really. If I'd just invested huge amounts of time and money into a language, only to have something new come along which eliminates the need for that knowledge, I guess I'd be PO'd too.

Would you build amazon.com using ColdFusion? No. But for the 99% of web apps that consist of "read info from database. display info from database. allow user to add to database" ColdFusion is perfect.

Re:Oh NO!!!!

[xtremex]

I think COldFusion is fantastic. (Even runs on Linux).

Re:Oh NO!!!!

[alfaiomega]

I've often heard of Cold Fusion that it makes the easy incredibly easy and makes the difficult impossible.

Makes the difficult impossible? That sounds like a bug, not a feature..

Yeah, it's kind of a different linguistic optimization than e.g. the Perl's one, which makes easy things easy and hard things possible. For me it's also a disadvantage, but I guess that's a matter of taste.

Re:Oh NO!!!!

[szap]

... Cold Fusion... CFML...

See Roxen for a similar, GPL'd product, using "RXML". Too bad there's not enough cool examples on that site. I don't have much experience in CFML, but I believe whatever CFML can pull off, RXML can handle better and more elegantly. BTW, RXML is XML compliant.

Great stuff for development. Incredibly easy, flexible (just gotta learn the internals), and source available.

Re:Oh NO!!!!

[Christianfreak]

Well I'm a Perl developer that hates Cold Fusion and I'll give you some reasons other than "it being too easy" why.

Now I will admit that I've had limited experiance with CF but this is what I've observed with it.

1. Hard to separate HTML from actual logic code. Now I know a lot of languages that have this problem (PHP comes to mind). But when you're a web developer who has designers that don't always understand the logic behind a program, separating it makes a lot of since. (I know it is possible to separate but it still feels kludgy to me)

2. CF runs in user space on the webserver. What I mean here is normally true on named virtual hosts. We do a lot of hosting at my company. We build websites for people. They have the username and password to get into their directories on the system. We can keep the Perl code in cgi-bin or in a perl directory and templates with HTML code that work with the perl in another directory, then the main HTML directory is fairly clean and the user can't go in and break something. With all the CF implementations I've seen everything would have to be in that HTML directory. We can't deny the user access so they can get in and mess with it. (and then call us when its broken).

There may be ways around these problems but I've not seen them. For now I'll stick with Perl :) thanks.

Re:Oh NO!!!!

[codealot]

We stopped using CF because it was slow and fragile. 4.5 was a disaster, Allaire should never have released it. Doubtless MX is much better, but it's too late for us.

Regarding the user directories, a problem inherent in CF (and ASP, PHP, JSP) is that included pages can be requested from a browser. That is, if login.cfm includes /incl/check_access.cfm then I can request http://somedomain.com/incl/check_access.cfm from a browser and see what happens... more often than not an error message will appear, but I've seen sites hacked that way. Templates that are not intended to be pages simply shouldn't be in the document root. (On any

You can get around that on ColdFusion by naming included files with an absolute path, and configuring the template path in CF administrator. But that doesn't completely solve your problem.

Re:FP!

[gibler]

I'll see your first post and raise you one.

Re:Ode to Slashdot v1.0.3

[Alric]

*sigh*

Flash sucks, period

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash typically waiting for pointless unneeded animations while frantically looking for the "skip intro" button. These sort of "flashlocked" pages are to be avoided; they are designed to keep people out.

Here's a great example of a site made totally unusable by being flashlocked:

http://www.globemusic.com/flash.html

Thinking of flash? Do it in HTML instead.

Re:Flash sucks, period

[SirRichardPumpaloaf]

Ugh, that site is pretty annoying. Flash can be nice when used properly, though. For example, go to mlb.com and click on the "Gameday" link for one of the games in progress. It's a nice way to follow a game when you're at work, especially since the ESPN java-based one seems to be always broken on the remote end these days.

Oooooooh well.

[rice_burners_suck]

Macromedia should be made to donate a hundred million dollars to the development of Linux and its various programs before they're given the priviledge of calling any of their stuff "open source" because back in the day, when Linux was new, they didn't bother supporting Linux. But now that other people have made Linux a success, without their help, Macromedia expects to profit off this for free or something. So they should have to pay for it.

Other than that, it's cool that they want to call themselves part of the open source community. Ooooooooh well.

Re:Oooooooh well.

[LemurShop]

No they don't. Its all part of the, ya know, -free- software. It works both ways, fir people that pay, and for people that dont.

Re:Oooooooh well.

[SirRichardPumpaloaf]

What are you talking about? My recollection is that they have had a Flash plugin for Linux for many years now, despite the fact that I'm sure it hasn't made them one dime. What they've done for Linux far outweighs anything you and your slobbering Slashdot buddies have done, I'm sure of that.

Re:Oooooooh well.

[bons]

And here we have a perfect example of the greed that has stepped into the shoes of Free (as in Beer) software. Someone who not only has hopped on the bandwagon because, hey, Linux is cool, but now sees their position on the bandwagon to allow they to make a profit, while at the same time pointing the finger at someone else because they want to make a profit.

And what's more amazing is that someone modded it up. (Note. In the course of this essay, someone got smart and correct that little bit of insanity. Thanks.)

Macromedia has, for quite a long time, been much more open with it's technology than other companies. Any other group has been able to download the specs, sample code, and write programs that either display or create swf files.

Various Source Code files for playing, reading, or writing flash files.

SWF Format Specification

Meanwhile Macromedia has been supporting Linux for awhile now. You can get a Flash 5 player for Linux (they're currently working on the Flash 6 player) and ColfFusion for Linux, Heck they even have a link to Slashdot.

Are they SourceForge or FreshMeat or some other part of ODSN? Heck no. They're a company. just like any other, but while they may not meet the various acid tests everyone here is proposing, what they are doing is trying to do the Right Thing (tm). They are becoming more open. They're starting to embrace the philosophy. They're taking the risk.

And for that, they should be rewarded, not punished, lest we drive everyone else away as well.

MM products on linux?

[LemurShop]

Hopefuly this is Macromedia's first step in porting some of their products to Linux. I'm sure that many developers are wishing that dreamweaver/flash woudl be available on linux. It would olso be a good step forward on getting the visual programmers/designers to hop onto linux.

Im sure we wont see open source flash any time soon, (or ever), but could be a step to see some great programs to open source platforms.

Re:MM products on linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eeh, ColdFusion has been available on Linux for some time now. Ok, it was Allaire back then, but still, CF is running on Linux

Re:MM products on linux?

[tunah]

If they released dreamweaver MX for linux, I would never have to boot Win2k again.

Re:MM products on linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash SDK is already available, with full papers.

In other news, RMS dies of acute depression

[Anonymous Coward]

A story about open source certification posted under the GNU topic?

Re:In other news, RMS dies of acute depression

[mpawlo]

I actually submitted the story under a different topic. Lucky for me that RMS is not too keen on surfing.

Re:In other news, RMS dies of acute depression

[Russ Nelson]

Well, we gave CmdrTaco an early look at the Open Source trademark icon, and he said "Nahhhhh, if I can't change it, I'm not going to use it."

-russ

Re:In other news, RMS dies of acute depression

[sinserve]

RMS visits my scat tgp site almost everynight.

--

Re:In other news, RMS dies of acute depression

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, excuse me, but...are you the Russ Nelson?

Hey, a real bonafide actual old-school hacker posts on Slashdot. Its just...spooky.

Someone post a goatse.cx link, quickly! I'm getting spooked!

Not an expert...

[twilight30]

... but my guess is that this is nothing more than a sop to the people who would want to use/advocate/further SVG (main target) or the Ming/PHP extensions (secondary target). They're not really releasing the source to Flash. They're not really committing to making Flash-capable editors available a la FlashMX. This strikes me as really just a 'cover-yer-ass' move. Looks nice from faraway, but quite ugly up close.

The acid test should be whether or not they decide to open it up so that ordinary people can just plug in an Emacs mode and write Flash code. And how likely is that?

It's too bad, even with all the people around Slashdot that hate Flash. I don't see a lot of Windows users with SVG plug-ins ... and I even know two people that work at Macromedia. Oh well...

Re:Not an expert...

[Russ Nelson]

Have you considered not speculating, and waiting to see what actually happens? Nooooo, this is Slashdot.

-russ

Re:Not an expert...

[phoxix]

notice how the parent poster stated: ....

... but my guess is that ...

Have you thought of reading before posting?

Sunny

Re:Not an expert...

[SirRichardPumpaloaf]

Um, why can't you just write Flash code in emacs? The specs are up at openswf.org. If you're complaining that they haven't ported their authoring environment it's probably because they don't think they could recoup their expenses, but the file format is open.

Re:Not an expert...

[KILNA]

Uh, did you happen to notice that it what his entire point by using the word "speculating", and that perhaps his issue wasn't *what* he was guessing so much as that he *was* guessing, in a fairly reactionary manner? A guess presented without any evidence for the supposition, which made it all the more pointless.

Re:Not an expert...

[jchristopher]

+3, interesting, huh?

What's REALLY interesting is that everyone assumes that this article is in regards to Flash - but the guy who submitted the request to review the Macromedia license is working on CFML language development.

That's right, ColdFusion. In my opinion, an open-source ColdFusion would be a hell of a lot more interesting than an open source Flash.

The Flash format is already public, and there are 3rd party tools that can write .swf files. ColdFusion, on the other hand, would have all kinds of interesting possibilities if open-sourced. One positive effect might be the improvement of the ease of use of other languages...

Re:Not an expert...

[KILNA]

s/it what his/it was his/;

Re:Not an expert...

[Russ Nelson]

Of course he was just guessing. I'm suggesting that he not guess!
-russ

Re:Not an expert...

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion, an open-source ColdFusion would be a hell of a lot more interesting than an open source Flash.

Take a look at the Caudium web server. It supports A CF-like interface called RXML, that makes web apps a snap.

Re:This should be refused as a matter of principle

[Anonymous Coward]

The acid test of any license is whether it's DFSG free and can thus be included in Debian, Mandrake and other Free Software distributions. Groups like Apple and the DivX team have been known to release purportedly "open source" software under look-but-don't-touch style licenses. Of note is the Darwin Streaming Server from Apple which, while passing the OSI open-source definition is not actually Free Software because it demands that you hand over all changes even if you don't distribute the software (you can see why this is a crazy notion).

Nevertheless, Macromedia has some cool technologies and I can see them being widely implemented if there are truly free and complete implementations.

flash: makes coders lazy.

[GoatPigSheep]

I feel that flash becoming open source is NOT a good thing for web designers. If it's support becomes more widespread and standard, it could cause web coders to become more lazy. A couple of examples.

Often web designers use marquees. Instead of using the much quicker tag, many designers use bloated swf files for their marquees.

Another way flash is abused is with flashing text. Instead of using the common tag, people create huge swf files to make blinking text.

Another abuse, forms. Instead of using quick java based forms, people often create huge flash files just to input data.

Finally, animations. Coders could easily use dhtml and animated gifs to create effective animations on their page, however instead they use bloated swf files that need state of the art pc's just to run simple anumations.

Re:flash: makes coders lazy.

[LemurShop]

depends on the sites you visit.
Geocities site of the week award winning website about the webmaster's cat might have all that. As for the animations in web pages part: Flash is hyst a better tool. Better than Java or Shockwave, beter than dhtml.

Another abuse, forms. Instead of using quick java based forms, people often create huge flash files just to input data.

I think you mean javascript, not Java, they are two different things. And most of the forms i see are just html form tags with some css decorations thrown in to make them look better.

Re:flash: makes coders lazy.

[josh crawley]

----"I feel that flash becoming open source is NOT a good thing for web designers. If it's support becomes more widespread and standard, it could cause web coders to become more lazy. A couple of examples."

Take a look at the license. It's too restrictive. They're just using 'Open Source' for a name, like many companies do. I don't blame them for it though. Might even get Linux tools for Macromedia up, and the last thing to do is bad-mouth them for it.

"Often web designers use marquees. Instead of using the much quicker tag, many designers use bloated swf files for their marquees.

That's just plain moronic.

"Another way flash is abused is with flashing text. Instead of using the common tag, people create huge swf files to make blinking text."

It's because people strip the blink flags off of html. You uuse something that works, and blinking text is annoying, but works.

"Another abuse, forms. Instead of using quick java based forms, people often create huge flash files just to input data."

They're a lot less usable, but you know of many bots that can "sign up" using these forms? That's why they use them.

"Finally, animations. Coders could easily use dhtml and animated gifs to create effective animations on their page, however instead they use bloated swf files that need state of the art pc's just to run simple anumations"

Using Flash is similar to programming. There's an efficent way of doing it and there's an inefficent way. I've seen both. It's just a tool.

Re:flash: makes coders lazy.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is usually just as easy to get bots to sign up for Flash-interface forms as it is for standard HTML forms. The reason is that most Flash-based forms do a http POST just as normal forms do. Remember, the common interface is HTTP, not HTML.

Re:flash: makes coders lazy.

[spage]

Coders could easily use dhtml and animated gifs to create effective animations on their page, however instead they use bloated swf files that need state of the art pc's just to run simple animations.

Don't blame the bloat on the file format. SWF files are neck-and-neck with large animated GIFs since they're vector-based and use outline fonts; and a simple drop-down menu in Flash is very compact code compared with roll-over GIFs in DHTML layers. I've built both. If you're Microsoft and you can cram your creative designer's chosen font into the OS, then DHTML *text* layers are extremely compact, but everyone else trying to use a corporate font should find SWFs smaller.

Macromedia's own global nav movie with three fonts and a text box is all of 12.2 kB (the static GIF version may be smaller but has no rollovers). BTW, most users never realize such "quiet" animations are Flash, it's the James Bond-movie-trailer-on-acid intros that you can only do in Flash that give it the Flashy reputation.

Hey, use whatever works for you; Macromedia Dreamweaver is a fine tool for developing cross-browser DHTML animations, as is vim.

Re:flash: makes coders lazy.

[Anonymous Coward]

blinking text is annoying, but works.

It blinks, if that's what you mean by works. I've never clicked on ads that blink. I've never seen anyone else do so either. I've worked with a company that had blinking ads from time to time, and we had more customers complain and threaten to leave than we made on showing those kinds of ads. We often pulled them, in fact.

Aside from ads, if you have blinking text, it's a site too cheesy to deserve a return visit.

Everything I just said applies to marquees too. :)

Re:flash: makes coders lazy.

[kirkjobsluder]

SWF is not only neck and neck with GIF, it beats it hands-down if you are working with vector animation. A simple test movie comes in at 12K. The same movie rendered as an animated GIF comes in at 44K. A simple two-object animated banner I made is %80 the same size of the original GIF primarily because the Flash crops the bitmaps while GIF files are one big bitmap.

In addition, (responding to the original poster) I don't buy the claim that the math involved in positioning 2D vector graphics on the screen using Flash is that much more expensive than decompressing and displaying multiple stacked bitmaps, or running an animation applet through the Java runtime compiler. It's not like we are talking about a brand-new technology here. I have professors who were doing vector graphic computer art on punchcards and plotters. The computations invovled are not that much more complex than drawing a windowing desktop.

Re:This should be refused as a matter of principle

[yukster]

"Nonsense. Flash plugin files are practically a standard on the most popular platforms for web browsing, in a similar way to how TCP/IP became a standard despite non-approval by ISO."

I fear you have these two sentences reversed... the latter is the nonsense. Well, Flash may have become a defacto standard because a lot of people fell for the bells and whistles that it provides. However, proprietary tools should never be officially acknolwedged as a standard. The internet is an international community that must remain open to all nationalities, classes, races, etc. Therefore, official standards should always be based on open source code and open and accepted protocols.

Furthermore, comparing Flash to TCP/IP is moronic. One's a proprietary animation program the other is an open and extremely well documented set of protocols... apples and oranges. The acceptance of any company's proprietary software as a standard should be resisted. Inevitably, SVG or some other open web language will usurp Flash. And, really that shouldn't be that big a deal; Macromedia has and a great run with Flash and made plenty of money off of it. Maybe it's time for them to move on to a new technology market to corner.

Finally, If I were you, I'd do some long hard thinking about your attitude towards web browsers and standards in general. It is absolutely essential that no one company gain a 100% share of the browser market because then that company makes all the rules for how the web works and can charge everyone anything they want for admittance. A chilling thought. Wake up and smell the freedom of open source, bozo.

How nice...

[mnordstr]

That's nice and all, but can't they already fix the annoying Flash plugin bug that tries to open the sound device without any checks of any kind?! It's so simple and annoys everyone, but they can't make that one simple patch!?

Re:How nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

That one, and also the bug that prevents Flash from working in Mozilla over remote X displays.

I mean, come on Macromedia, both of these bugs have been known for over a year, and you haven't done jack shit to fix them. How about some action instead of just talk, eh?

What kind of language is this?

[extrasolar]

"clarify that if Macromedia includes its own open source in its products, Macromedia
does not have to state in its documentation where the source code version of the open
source material is made available,"

Since when is Open Source a noun?

Anyway, anyone have any idea what they are planning?

Re:What kind of language is this?

[ForceOfWill]

'Source' is a noun. 'Open' is an adjective which, in this case, describes 'source'.

I hope this clears that up.

Re:What kind of language is this?

[dangermouse]

"Source" has always been a noun. "Open" has always been an adjective.

Re:What kind of language is this?

[WebMasterJoe]

"Open" has always been an adjective.

Except when it's a verb - "Open that source!"

No kidding

[extrasolar]

And because of ESR and Friends, Macromedia probably isn't aware of the GNU project or its grand vision for the future.

Sad. Very sad.

Mod Parent down

[phoxix]

Sorry, but this honestly has to be one of the most disgusting posts I have ever read.

There were plenty of companies back in the old days that did not support Linux. And yet that is understandable because in all honesty, it didn't make much sense financially to support linux (ask Id software about this, they've been behind linux forever.) Now however, times have changed. For the first time ever, supporting linux may not be a burden, but something that is actually 'pretty cool' (how good linux is to a company financially is still beyond us.)

As linux users, it is not in our place to slap the wrists of those that did not support us in the past. But too rather sit here and help them. I for sure welcome Macromedia into the OSS arena. While I too have yet to see the outcome, I'm sure any thing the contribute will be greatly . appreciated.

(And when you think about it, you come to the realization that Macromedia is a far better company than Adobe. And if you thought about it some more, you'd realize Adobe is even worse than Microsoft is.)

Sunny

Re:Mod Parent down

[KILNA]

Your disgust is warranted. False entitlement reveals ignorance, conceit, greed and sloth all in a single fell swoop. How someone could've regarded the post as insightful is beyond me... When should a business go open source? When it makes business sense. It now makes sense for Macromedia, and we're getting sour grapes served up as insight. Is it any that wonder open source enthusiasts are stereotyped as self-righteous zealots?

Re:Mod Parent down

[rice_burners_suck]

Sorry my post offended you. I'm replying in connection to your statement that, "if you thought about it some more, you'd realize Adobe is even worse than Microsoft is." Could you please explain your logic? I know Adobe sucks for several reasons:

• They got Dmitry in big trouble, those bastards.
• They make Adobe Acrobat, which displays PDF files, yet that stupid program doesn't display Postscript files, Postscript being the parent format of PDF, and a format they, themselves invented.
• They bitched and moaned about KIllustrate allegedly confusing customers, when everybody knows full well that KIllustrate and Adobe Illustrator are not even similar, let alone confusing. (Besides, anybody who is confused is an idiot.)

All that said, Microsoft is the big huge evil empire. They're gonna end up turning this world into a 100% digitally rights managed world where you have to prove your innocence every time someone farts or you'll be taken to torture chambers and made to conform. Microsoft's products are some of the worst ones out there in terms of bloat, efficiency and reliability, and yet they've managed to stuff their garbage down the throats of the entire world, getting everything so tied up in their proprietary formats and whatnot that it'll be damn near impossible for the good guys (Linux and the other Free software projects out there) to save the world. Adobe's programs are somewhat more reliable than Microsoft's, in my experience (I used them in school--no, I'd never waste money on their software when there's perfectly good free alternatives, and even if there weren't, I'd buy from Corel, or anyone else who's more reputable than Adobe), and Adobe's software isn't shoved down every single person's throat. So, sorry for wasting your time, but how is Adobe worse than Microsloth?

Re:Mod Parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

h3y, puto, i m b4ck!!!!!!!111111111111 micro$0ft SUX!!!!11111111 ad0b3 SUX!!!!!!111111111 tha governm3nt wantz 2 take away r rights!!!11111111 DRM SUX!!!11111111 earn $$$$ for h4x0r!!!111111

Now are you happy? See, I got typos in there. I said Micro$oft sucks (because they do, and it's a fact). I'm sorry (there's that word again) for not previously telling everyone how much

• Micro$oft
• Adobe
• Commercial software
• Wasteful government spending

SUCK! But on the other hand, I did not praise commercial software in my previous posts. Oooooooh well. I need some Negra Modelo. Actually, in a little while, I'm going out to drink like ten kegs of beer with my buddies, and then my g/f will probably call and bitch and moan about how boring it's been all day, and then I'll have to go over there and fall asleep on her bed instead of just conking out at my buddy's house, which is significantly closer to the bar where I'll be getting totally fscked up tonight. Oh well... I'll just have to call a cab and have them drive my happy donkey (ass is a bad word, so I substitute donkey whenever possible) all the way to her house, cuz I ain't driving drunk. That's illegal and dangerous. You know, cuz you could wrap your car around a tree. (See, I don't care about my own personal safety. It's my car that I care about, and that's why I refuse to drive drunk. That and the fact that I don't want someone else getting hurt, just because I had to be an idiot or something. It's funny when you get yourself hurt, but not when some innocent shmoe that happened to be over there at the moment gets hurt too, you know what I'm saying?) Now as far as the beer, it (the beer) ain't gonna be free (as in software), but it'll be good beer nonetheless. Negra Modelo. Because Guinness isn't quite as good. (I don't say Guinness sucks anymore, because quite frankly, it's alright once you get used to it, and especially if drinked in enormous quantities, but when it comes down to it, Cerveceria Modelo produces what is perhaps the best beer (they call it an ale) in the world. And that's Negra Modelo, obviously. Modelo Especial is pretty good too. They also make a lot of crappy beers, but that doesn't degrade the quality of Negra Modelo at all.)

Ooooooooh well. Maybe I just need to be modded down all the way to hell or something.

Re:Mod Parent down

[rice_burners_suck]

Man, I don't go to the damn frats. Cuz they SUCK!

It could be JRun

[Anonymous Coward]

For all you know, they might be releasing
JRun srcs.

Flash History

[crisco]

I bet there is very little common code between the Flash authoring environment and the Freehand and Director environments. There might be a little more in the players but even that would just be the common plugin and OS code. If there was more common code, don't you think they would have integrated they players by now?

Take a look at this history of Flash. Also consider that the Flash interface and featureset hasn't changed much between versions (Adobe's Livemotion and Swish both show how additional features could benefit a SWF authoring environment).

As regards the open source license, Macromedia has been hinting that they are bringing some of their new 'MX' server features that are already available in Cold Fusion MX to server environments like PHP and JSP. Perhaps some of this will be released under an open source license? Don't think for a miniute they are releasing the Flash Authoring environment as an Open Source app, that has to be one of their best selling products.

Office of Scientific Investigation?

[Blaede]

Who's gonna sign off on it, the Max Headroom guy, or LaCroix from Forever Knight?

As I said...

[twilight30]

I'm not a Flash expert, and no, I wasn't complaining as such. I take your point about the OpenSWF website though, thanks.

I implied by mentioning the Ming extensions that there were/are plans to just simply write Flash using whatever other tools (on Linux/*BSD), but you're right, I should have noted that explicitly.

Re:This should be refused as a matter of principle

[SirRichardPumpaloaf]

Flash isn't proprietary, it's a open format described at openswf.org. And drop the name calling, it's really juvenile.

Linux ver of authoring tools

[T-Ranger]

Well, a good question for sure.

Some people use linux because it is better the other OSs. Some people use it because it is free-as-in-beer.

For the people who use it because it is better, the macromedia authoring tools are better then the tools that currently exist for unix/linux (ie, none save for programatic creation).

If the win and mac versions of director come from a common code base, esp if they have an OS X version then the code is already writen with cross platform portability in mind. If thats the case then it would be relativly trivial to do the port to linux.

But the ultimate problem is that web desiginers desigine for IE, which means they test with IE. Which means there running IE on a MS OS. Unitl webdesiginers are actualy using linux then there wont be a market.

Re:A Plea

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll be modded a troll, but I mean the following quite sincerely:

To me flash is to browsing as spam is to e-mail and telemarketing is to telephones. A nuisance, a bandwdith sink and a time waster. Please make flash go away.

The important question is...

[autopr0n]

What software are they open sourcing? The artical on greplaw is shorter then the slashdot blurb. I'm assuming they're opening the flash plug in. Anything else?

JRun a more likely open source candidate

[AmateurCoder]

In the beginning(a few years ago anyway) JRun was hands down the most usable, and stable Servlet server. . . but now Tomcat has matured, and a few other companies offer comptitive java application servers.

I suspect this competition has erroded Macromedia's profits on JRun and open sourcing might be a way to attempt to breath new life into it.

Re:JRun a more likely open source candidate

[M$ Mole]

Not likely, as an employee I can tell you that JRUN is one of our most important products - in fact the latest version of ColdFusion has been built on top of an embedded version of JRUN.

Re:JRun a more likely open source candidate

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe a few years ago JRun was the greatest servlet server, but the support for it recently hasn't been the best (lagging behind the times), the licensing fees were going up, and the product was frustrating as heck to work with at times.

My company went to Tomcat as an alternative, and that's the best decision they could have made.

You know, that's a hell of a point

[twilight30]

What does CF do that say, PHP or Perl does not?

Re:You know, that's a hell of a point

[jchristopher]

What does CF do that say, PHP or Perl does not?

Nothing that I can think of off the top of my head. But that's besides the point - people aren't using ColdFusion because it has some unique feature set that nothing else has, they are using it because it is powerful and easy.

There's nothing wrong with Perl. But let's say you have someone that knows HTML and nothing else. Compare the time it takes that person to learn enough ColdFusion to build database applications with the time it takes to teach someone enough Perl to build database applications, and the advantages become obvious.

That's the funny thing, typically, any comparison between ColdFusion and PHP starts with someone spouting "LOL, ColdFusion sucks!" But the error is in the assumption that in order for PHP to be good, ColdFusion must suck, or vice versa.

Both are good and serve their intended purpose. If you have experience with C and Unix you will probably like PHP. If you are more familiar with Windows and don't have a programming background, you will probably like ColdFusion. Both can be used to achieve the same result.

Re:You know, that's a hell of a point

[Anonymous Coward]

What does CF do that say, PHP or Perl does not?

Blows goats, big time? Actually, I don't know PHP or Perl well enough to comment, so they may suck too. But CF really sucks it hard. I suppose it lets lamers acomplish very simple things and think there leet, but it also lets lamers accomplish 90% of something complex in such a way that acomplising the last 10% requires the later "maintainer" ("completer" actually; aka Me) to treat the project as a Black box, re-writing the whole thing in somthing real, while not looking at the source, because that way lies madness and doom. Not that I'm bitter or anything. Takeaway point: ColdFusion. Run Away. Goats.

Since when was the word "source" NOT a noun?

[cpeterso]

Since when is Open Source a noun?

Linux support

[axxackall]

I hope they will support Linux. Not only Linux/x86, but Linux in general, including x86, PPC, m68k, mips, Sparc, S390 - all official (at least non-experimental) architectures in the current Linux kernel source tree.

It might be a budget issue, so Macromedia might use the experience of Sun and Blackdown. It would be not big deal to create a team of developers porting Macromedia plugin and authoring tools from Linux x86 to the other architectures. I sure that developers from other linux platforms and from Mozilla team would help.

Would it be available for Linux in general I would support Flash rather than Java raw applets. I like its design and it's easier to create new very Flashy applications extending plain web sites and making web more attractive for customers.

Why Linux in general? Think more - it's about Flash plugin in Mozilla for embedded systems (i.e. kiosks and terminals). Also I would like to run Macromedia Flash authoring tools on my Linux/PPC rather than on that stupid Mac OS.

Linux is a very good OS for software development. Macromedia must understand it.

Re:Linux support

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only Linux/x86, but Linux in general, including x86, PPC, m68k, mips, Sparc, S390 - all official (at least non-experimental) architectures in the current Linux kernel source tree.

It might be a budget issue

AHA! Macromedia want OSI certification so that they can use the Sourceforge compile farm! The sneaks...

Interesting

[twilight30]

I used to be a dotbomb manager and one of my employees loved using CF. Looked cool. Anyway, after getting laid off I figured I'd go with PHP for consulting work (no CF on Linux, you see) and I haven't looked back.

The thing that clicked for me was the fact that I could get documentation, textbooks and all the source easily with PHP. I suppose if CF is moving more to an open-source model that things might improve for Macromedia too. Who knows?

Anyway, thank you. That was very insightful and I hope the moderators recognise your comment as such (if you care about such things).

Re:Interesting

[Blue Booger]

I personally like PHP better than CF, but CF *IS* available for Linux. We are running 5.0 on Linux right now, and 4.5 was available as well.

Re:Interesting

[jchristopher]

FYI, as has already been stated, ColdFusion IS available for Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX as well as Windows.

As to the source not being available thing... I guess I can understand that. But consider this - what % of people would actually know what to do with the PHP source if they had it?

OSD == DFSG

[yerricde]

The acid test of any license is whether it's DFSG free [...] Of note is the Darwin Streaming Server from Apple which, while passing the OSI open-source definition is not actually Free Software because it demands [...]

Actually, the OSI's Open Source Definition and the Debian Free Software Guidelines are very nearly the same document.

haiku

[jooon]

For those of you who really don't want to read through the license, here it is in haiku form:

Macromedia: Just like IBM / but this baby has our name / Macromedia Inc

and of course IBM's

IBM: You really wish that/ Our licenses would fit in/ merely three short lines.

More:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000360
http://www.quicktopic.com/boing/H/xk9pNnpwmwRdU

SVG == scalable vector graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

SVG is an XML-based vector graphics language and is a W3 specification - I'd call that fairly open...

old news

[Anonymous Coward]

swfnews.com reported on this 5 days ago. You can check out the thread here. Someone directly from Macromedia chimmed in and suggested it had to do with Cold Fusion extensions.

creativity is not a virtue in licensing

[bfields]

Why do companies have to keep coming up with their own incompatible licenses? Seems to me that, say, the BSD license, the GPL, and the LGPL cover most of the reasonable things you'd want to do with your (free) code, they're relatively well-understood by the community, and they all play nicely together.

Why should we have to waste time trying to evaluate new licenses, when we could just deal with licenses that we already know?

--J. Bruce Fields

Re:creativity is not a virtue in licensing

[Make]

At least FSF doesn't think that GPL and BSD license are compatible:

GPL-Incompatible, Free Software Licenses

But then again, who cares what RMS thinks about BSD license... I couldn't find a real reason for this incompatibility.

Re:creativity is not a virtue in licensing

[praedor]

New licenses make up for the weaknesses of both the BSD and GPL/LGPL licenses. BSD licenses give away the whole candy store, letting leeches like M$ take other people's code without paying them, then charging an arm and a leg for something their own coders are incapable of producing themselves.

The GPL is anti-money, making it almost impossible for most coders to make any money unless they can nab a consulting job or in-house deal where code release is unrequired.

I like licenses along the lines of the QPL (QT license), though it has fixable flaws. Nail big money-maker companies for licensing fees (only frickin' fair) but allow joe schmoe to have at the code as he see's fit.

All they have to do to make the QPL the best of an intractable situation is to eliminate the need to decide up-front whether or not the code you produce is going to be for sale. It should be left to be decided after the benefits, perhaps originally unknown, of the software are realized after its creation - then pay the license fee for commercial development to QT. Instead, they expect you to know up front whether or not you will sell your code and pay or not accordingly. Silly rule.

Re:creativity is not a virtue in licensing

[bfields]

At least FSF doesn't think that GPL and BSD license are compatible

Right. I should have said "BSD without advertising clause".

--Bruce Fields

Re:Slashdot Summer Camp - BOOK NOW!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet, funniest shit I read all week.

P.S. I have been a fan of yours from day 1.

-sinserve

Official Macromedia Flash Player Source available!

[gd23ka]

I might also add that the Macromedia source code for version 5 of their Flash player is available here here. Don't get all excited just right now though, they make you fill out a questionaire and then decide whether they want to let you have it.

Don't get too excited yet

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the Application, the signer works in "Macromedia Server Products, CFML Language Development".

A logical conclusion would be that it applies to Cold Fusion (Allaire merged with Macromedia)

the cancer spreads

[Anonymous Coward]

arghhhhhh now there will be no place safe !!!

Zope

[matvei]

"In my opinion, an open-source ColdFusion would be a hell of a lot more interesting than an open source Flash."

Zope is a free (as in speech) application server written in python.

From the Zope website:

Zope is a leading open source application server, specializing in content management, portals, and custom applications. Zope enables teams to collaborate in the creation and management of dynamic web-based business applications such as intranets and portals.

Xiph and Macromedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Theory on the street is Xiph and Macromedia will be starting an Open Source 2.0, marking a partnership between them.

There *are* "reasonably workable implementations"

[schepers]

...such as, the plug-in by Adobe, and the server-side Batik tools by Apache, as well as a few for handhelds. So I guess that Flash is not the be-all and end-all. Sorry to spoil your schadenfreude.

Incidentally, a talented Flash coder recently even used the Flash plug-in to render a portion of parsed SVG; however, since SVG has many features Flash lacks (such as filters and true text support), a full implementation is beyond the current Flash player (see links to the examples and an analysis here).

SVG Plug-In

[schepers]

If you don't see a lot of people with the plug-in, you probably aren't looking. ;-)

There are an estimated 167 million installations of version 2 of Adobe's viewer (it's bundled with Acrobat Reader 5). Most people just don't realize that they have it. When I show people SVG stuff, they've usually had the viewer installed.

That aside, I agree; Macromedia's move strikes me as lip-service. But it'd be nice to see more competition in that space, if it comes off.

macromedia could do more

[dreamsinter]

if they quit their offensive pop-up assault on my computer. Just because they can, doesn't mean they should, and frankly I have had so much of it it doesn't matter if they open the source for their entire bl**dy fscking set of software, I for one wouldn't waste my time.

If they would only learn to stop offending people, then maybe I'd agree that they've got a worthwhile product - as it stands, they have wasted my time and crashed my computer on a number of occasions, and they're still going at it.

Thumbs down, macromedia, until you learn some basic manners.

Re:This should be refused as a matter of principle

[Anonymous Coward]

in a similar way to how TCP/IP became a standard despite non-approval by ISO

Why do you think we're not all using DECNET? Because one (TCP) was open and free for anybody to implement, and the other wasn't.

You're comparing chalk to cheese.

Real Acid test

[Nailer]

The acid test of any license is whether it's DFSG [debian.org] free and can thus be included in Debian, Mandrake and other Free Software distributions.

Er, no. The Open Source Definition and the Free Software List of Freedoms are used a lot more commonly than the DFSG, which the OSD to a certain extend replaced. I think you just saw this as an excuse to advocate Debian ignoring well known yardstick of the Open Source / Free Software community. Mandrake use the OSD themselves to define what should and shouldn't be in their distro, as do Red Hat (both of which do include proprietary apps, eg Netscape 4, when there are no stable OSS alternatives).

Groups like Apple and the DivX team have been known to release purportedly "open source" software under look-but-don't-touch style licenses.

They are lying. As there's as little to stop them saying a proprietary application is Open Source under the DFSG as there is the Open Source Definition.

Well, it's the knock-on effects...

[twilight30]

meaning not 'I know what to do with source,' but rather, 'I may not know what to do with source, but I bet I can find someone else out there who does'.

Speaking only for myself, I'd say that the knock-on effects were the only thing that decided it -- more documentation, more books, more info out there. The fact of having to pay for it was not a problem; it being absent would be.

Re:This should be refused as a matter of principle

[yukster]

Sorry. I was impassioned.

Its Not Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

There has been a lot of talk from the MM Developer Community about open sourcing their application framework called Spectra. This is basically a huge amount of CFML tags which give you a framework to build enterprise scals CMS's and other web apps.

I don't think they will be Open Sourcing Flash anytime soon.

Re:Ode to Slashdot v1.0.3

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is "Ninety eighty four" ?

90 80 4?
And what is it doing here?

Maybe that's supposed to represent the sum.
hmm...
174... 174.. doesn't ring a bell..

OH WAIT!

that sounds like 1984.

But it can't be. Nobody is SOOOOO FUCKING STUPID that they would confuse nineteen with ninety simply because they SOUND alike.

Are they?