dear all, am researching into immediate alternatives for flash, especially for authoring 100% muft and mukt education content. this part of the new , expanded approach we're taking for freed.in 2008. am trying to shortlist fileformats and standards that are 100% open standards. let's keep authoring out of the discussion for the moment.
for audio ogg wins hands down as an open standard over mp3. for 'passive' animations, i am all for divx, though i may reluctantly look at mpeg4 and even mpeg2. the good thing about divx is that it can deploy anywhere, and the new format of divx exceeds HD, which is a very big deal. for interactive animations, am looking at java. 01) however, now even i'm getting confused about java's license. wikipedia says sun has made 'most of their Java technologies' available under the GPL. so now which are the parts that are NOT under the GPL or a copyleft license, such that it may restrict the authoring of interactive java animations? do take a look at a shining and highly-commendable example from India, of 100% open education content authored using java for animations. this is called OSCAR, Opensource Courseware Animation Repository, produced and published by IIT-B under their KRESIT initiative. http://oscar.iitb.ac.in/aboutOscar.do under each animation, you may also download the java source code. the licenses of the code are copyleft, the license of the content is cc. with shishir jha behind it, that would go without saying :-) 02) to handle interactive 3D animations, how good, and alive and kickin' is Java3D? it's community source license is also a tad confusing. what are your views on this? 03) i tried opening the web-page of the simulation of 'dispersion of light', the java animation, on my mobile phone. doesn't render. do you think these java animations can be adopted or repurposed to be rendered on mobile phones and handhelds as well? what is the license of MIDP Java? 04) are there any other alternatives? svg seems to have a long way to go and suffers from other problems as well. your responses will be much appreciated, and please be considerate enough to stay focussed on the discussion. thanks in advance. :-) -- niyam bhushan _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [email protected] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Next Event: http://freed.in - February 22/23, 2008 Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
