I'm not sure if people will have seen this with all the other noise about Novell etc.:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2006-11-07.html http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html
The scripting engine of Flash (which, from what I've been told, is very much like Javascript anyway) has been donated to Mozilla, and will be part of their future JS implementation (I gather).
In other Adobe news, people may have seen that they're building on other free software like WebKit:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo
(RIA's == "Rich Internet Applications", FYI)
.. and Microsoft's XML Paper Specification seems to have scared them into doing:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Mars
While Adobe haven't been terribly free software friendly in many ways in the past, it does seem like now is an opportune time to talk to them: they may be becoming more receptive to the needs of the free software community.
Cheers,
Alex.
Alex Hudson <home <at> alexhudson.com> writes:
The scripting engine of Flash (which, from what I've been told, is very much like Javascript anyway) has been donated to Mozilla, and will be part of their future JS implementation (I gather).
In http://fortytwo.ch/blog/archives/2006/11/#e2006-11-07T08_56_44.txt Adrian von Bidder writes:
Now the only part that bothers me is that this likely means the Mozilla license will be used, which is AFAIK GPL-incompatible, which means that Konqueror will not get native flash in the foreseeable future now. Especially because I think that this move will cause work on the free flash player front (Gnash, and I believe there were others) to slow down.
Are Adobe and Mozilla helping or hurting other free software players?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
MJ Ray wrote:
Alex Hudson <home <at> alexhudson.com> writes:
The scripting engine of Flash (which, from what I've been told, is very much like Javascript anyway) has been donated to Mozilla, and will be part of their future JS implementation (I gather).
In http://fortytwo.ch/blog/archives/2006/11/#e2006-11-07T08_56_44.txt Adrian von Bidder writes:
Now the only part that bothers me is that this likely means the Mozilla license will be used, which is AFAIK GPL-incompatible, which means that Konqueror will not get native flash in the foreseeable future now. Especially because I think that this move will cause work on the free flash player front (Gnash, and I believe there were others) to slow down.
Are Adobe and Mozilla helping or hurting other free software players?
Uh, guys...please check the sources. The engine is being released under tri-license (MPL, GPL, LGPL), just like the rest of the Mozilla code.
Regards
Shane
On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 12:46 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
Now the only part that bothers me is that this likely means the Mozilla license will be used, which is AFAIK GPL-incompatible, which means that Konqueror will not get native flash in the foreseeable future now. Especially because I think that this move will cause work on the free flash player front (Gnash, and I believe there were others) to slow down.
Are Adobe and Mozilla helping or hurting other free software players?
In terms of "Tamarin" (which is the Mozilla name for the Adobe contribution, unless I'm wrong) the licensing is the standard Mozilla license, but that's the LGPL / GPL / MPL tri-license, not the MPL alone:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/
So, I would say Adrian is probably worrying about nothing - the code is GPL'd (as an option).
It's questionable how much help Tamarin actually is - while undoubtedly useful, it only solves a small part of the Free Flash problem - but I'm pretty sure that it's not harmful. I would also say it's unlikely anyone working on Free Flash would start developing Tamarin per se either - they may well use it, but they'd be worrying about different parts of the problem.
Cheers,
Alex.
On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 01:01:33PM +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:
On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 12:46 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
Are Adobe and Mozilla helping or hurting other free software players?
Adobe is hurting free software players in that does not yet provide an official interpretation of their EULA. What free software players developers need to know basically is: will Adobe sue us for *using* their player or generator tools for debugging our free software player ?
Mozilla is hurting free software players in that does not provide gnash with it's plugin finder service.
So, I would say Adrian is probably worrying about nothing - the code is GPL'd (as an option).
The whole idea beyond GPL is to be *tainting*. If it is *one* of *three* options, it will never taint anything. Adobe, or whoever else, will still be able to include in non-free applications.
--strk;
On Thu, 2006-11-09 at 23:37 +0100, strk wrote:
Mozilla is hurting free software players in that does not provide gnash with it's plugin finder service.
Last time I tried gnash, it was definitely not ready for public use.
So, I would say Adrian is probably worrying about nothing - the code is GPL'd (as an option).
The whole idea beyond GPL is to be *tainting*.
It would be better if you didn't refer to copyleft as "tainting" - the GPL doesn't taint anything.
If it is *one* of *three* options, it will never taint anything. Adobe, or whoever else, will still be able to include in non-free applications.
It's more important that Adobe made it free software than they made it only copyleft IMHO.
Cheers,
Alex.
In http://fortytwo.ch/blog/archives/2006/11/#e2006-11-07T08_56_44.txt Adrian von Bidder writes:
Now the only part that bothers me is that this likely means the Mozilla license will be used, which is AFAIK GPL-incompatible, which means that Konqueror will not get native flash in the foreseeable future now. Especially because I think that this move will cause work on the free flash player front (Gnash, and I believe there were others) to slow down.
From the looks (FAQ, headers in the source code), the code that was
released is tripple licensed (MPL, GPL, and LGPL), so konqueror can use that code, same for Gnash.
"Alfred M. Szmidt" ams@gnu.org writes:
From the looks (FAQ, headers in the source code), the code that was released is tripple licensed (MPL, GPL, and LGPL), so konqueror can use that code, same for Gnash.
And when Gnash moves to GPLv3?
Is the code that will be freed to be distrubted under "v2 or any later version" of the GPL?
Is the code that will be freed to be distrubted under "v2 or any later version" of the GPL?
Yes.