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

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 ..

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: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.

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?

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).