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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
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 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 ?
A story about open source certification posted under the GNU topic?
... 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
"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?
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.
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
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?
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
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?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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).
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
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