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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."
Miko O'Sullivan
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.
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Is this a sig?
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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.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
... 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.
... and I even know two people that work at Macromedia. Oh well...
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
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
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.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
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.
y .html#Lice nsingFreeSoftware
(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/philosoph
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.
No Zen is good zen
Since when is Open Source a noun?
cpeterso
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.
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?
The truth shall set you free!
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