21–30 of 67 posts
"The main reason we can't release Flash Player as open source is because there is technology in the Player that we don't own". Bullshit. Why don't you open source everything else then ?
Probably because the codebase is a steaming pile of crap.
Adobe claimed that they don't ship Flash Players with any known crashing bugs. They had a great blog post and it made at least me feel that maybe it wasn't their fault. Then the evidence is presented that they not only ship with known crashing bugs, but neglect to fix them for years.
Now comes the argument that they aren't allowed to open-source Flash because some of it is non-free. However, madars has already pointed out that Adobe has taken legal action over the RTMP protocol (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1107585) and, similarly (although a tad dated) Rob Savoye of the Gnash (GNU Flash) project has said:
The Adobe EULA for Flash forbids anyone who has installed their Flash tools or plugin from working on Flash technologies. This has had a chilling effect on the development of free Flash players, since a developer must either choose to decide that Adobe won't sue them over this, or to do what Gnash does, which is a slow and inefficient, clean room, reverse engineering project.
Adobe has declined to comment on this issue, since the confusion benefits their lockin of the market. Although Adobe has said they support Open Source projects, and donated Tamarin to Mozilla, we'd love to see a public statement that Gnash developers won't be subject to a lawsuit. It's very difficult to find developers that have never installed the Adobe software ever, which is what we've been doing to maintain our clean room approach.
(http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/30)
Adobe's hasn't been given a lot of hassle over Flash for a long time. We've kind of accepted that it was free as in beer, ran on Linux (if poorly), etc. Now we're seeing that Flash could become the barrier to HTML5 and we're finally re-evaluating Adobe's patronage. We've found out that we don't want to be Adobe's ward - protected, well-fed, etc. We want to be able to live and innovate for ourselves.
Like Sun and Java, I think Adobe will eventually open source but when they finally do it, it will be too little too late.
It seems to me that development for prototyping and proof of concept is cheaper and quicker in Flash/Flex and is still usable by a massive portion of internet users, even if it will not be in the future.
But still I think FlashPlayer/GoogleTalk can be open sourced, just leave the proprietary module as a stub, just like the Chromium without H.264 and Bookmark Sync.
From Wikipedia: On 20 January 2009 Adobe announced it will publish the RTMP specification. On 21 May 2009 Adobe filed a DMCA removal request on a Sourceforge-hosted implementation of the protocol. And now we are about to believe that: The Flash file format (SWF) specifications are open and unrestricted, so any company - even Apple - can build their own Flash Player if they want. Also freely available are related spec…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by "Resolve the licensing issue"? They don't own H.264, how do you want them to "resolve" something they don't own?
It always annoys me when people talk about "stuff" without thinking for a moment what the "stuff" actually is. What do you mean by "they don't own H.264"? What does "H.264" mean in your sentence? H.264 is a standard that defines how to decode an elementary video stream. You can't "own it". You can own rights to an implementation — but that's where things get interesting. There are many H.264 decoders, some of which a…
Well sure you can... you can patent it. In that case, making use of even an F/OSS implementation (such as x264) doesn't guarantee that you have not infringed upon MPEG LA's patents (where they are applicable/enforced).
Just put the h.264 code in a directory that is in a closed repository. Why is that soo hard? I don't believe the h.264 license limits the exposure of your internal api.