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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.
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
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
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?