Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 ..
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.
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
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
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.
=S
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