On Wed, 2006-11-08 at 03:25 +0000, Jon Grant wrote: > All looks like a little improvement, hope they release the rest eventually > > I got this reply from Matt Rozen at Adobe: > > "Adobe doesn't currently have plans to open source Adobe Flash Player > beyond what's being open sourced today."
That's not totally surprising, and to be honest I don't expect them to make it free software any time soon either. I'm not totally sure why: they argue the standards thing, which is mostly a bogus argument. Plus, their value isn't in Flash player at all: it's in the Flash tools. >From that point of view, while I would like to be able to view Flash 9 content with free software, for me it wouldn't make the actual freedom situation much different. Better, but not much different. > Re PDF, it's never been as portable an experience as they say for me. > Many times I get PDFs which render wrong because odd fonts have been > used. Depends very much how the PDFs are made. You can do things like embedding fonts, but then you get into copyright / patent issues :/ The move to an XML-based PDF format - and one which seems to have some level of inspiration from OpenDocument, at least in the container format - to me would be a huge step forward. There is a lot of competition in this area, too, and Adobe aren't the automatic winners: Microsoft's XML Paper Specification is going to be shipping in real software (Office 2k7) and real hardware (various printers, for example) very very soon, so Adobe are actually behind in technical terms at the moment. Since Adobe have a lot to lose, and aren't necessarily in a winning position right now, I would think that now is a good time to ensure that what they are doing is free software friendly, and guide them down a path where in the future they would see the value in making more of their products free software. Cheers, Alex. _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
