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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."
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.
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!
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
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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.
I'll be the first to mod you down.
......... 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.
/dev/dvd /dev/cdrom on my own) just in case someone would consider about buying a notebook.
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.
"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
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
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.
=S
we are currently working on the Flash 6 player for linux.
mike chambers
mesh@macromedia.com
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?
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.
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