Hi list, long-time-no-post :) I've a gnarly one here.
I contract to a VC funded startup formed to create a cross-platform desktop client. Unfortunately AIR's APIs are not low-level enough (e.g. you can't burn a CD with AIR). We've looked at Zinc, Shu Player, Janus and the rest but Zinc and Janus don't support MacOS very well and the legal issues around Shu Player make us wary of using it. This is a consumer-facing app and needs to be squeaky clean. How about embedding the NPAPI FP10 in a Java process? That would be cross-platform, and we could use NPRuntime to interact seamlessly from Java. The Flash Player license allows us to automate download of the FP10 installer, however these are the problems we still face: - If a user doesn't have the player installed, there will be a two-step install process (one for the player, one for our app), which is sooo 90s - We can't legally change the install location of the NPAPI plugin, so if we automate downloads of the NPAPI FP10 and the user doesn't have Mozilla installed it's unclear what we should do - Not sure if we can specify the kind of Player (NPAPI vs ActiveX) to download from adobe.com if the user is on Windows Even for the base case (a user with Mozilla and the NPAPI FP10 plugin installed prior to install of our app), should we talk this over with Adobe legal? Has anyone heard of Adobe entering into custom licensing agreements for this kind of thing (and I mean, actual bonafide true stories, not conjecture based on Adobe's licensing page making passing reference)? Hope this hits someone's cache! Cheers, Jules -- Jules Suggate Owner and Technical Lead Uphill Sprint Limited +64-21-157-8562
