On Feb 9, 12:57 pm, opinali <[email protected]> wrote: > The license OTOH sucks indeed; Sun has officially promised that JavaFX > would eventually be full open source - Rich Green from Sun was clear > about this years ago in the first JavaOnes that hyped JavaFX, so I > will continue to quote this to remember everybody that Sun either lied > or broke a promise to developers, until they (now Oracle) open source > at least the desktop runtime. (javafxc is already open source, but > that's clearly insufficient. There are some encumbered pieces like > codecs but missing these would be ok, the FOSS community could replace > them.)
"just open source" for licenses isn't enough - if Oracle wants commercial JavaFX applications, then they need to change the Scenegraph license from GPL to a more liberal license (e.g., Apache / BSD style). Codecs are a different matter: Oracle can't open source them because they license them from other companies and pay for that. Now you could use open source codecs for audio/video, but the main problem is two-fold: - On Netbooks and mobile devices you need hardware acceleration at least for video to get decent playback. H.264 has that now (e.g., iPhone) or soon (e.g., Flash Player 10.1). - With Flash, Silverlight, the iPhone and Blu-Ray all supporting H. 264, it has become the de-facto video codec. It will be hard to convince content owners otherwise. This battle over H.264 (comes with patents and royalties for certain uses) has already stalled the HTML 5 <video> / <audio> tags - no mandatory format is defined (http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/ 2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-codec-debate.ars). But just a couple of days ago, H.264 declared to be royalty-free for internet video streaming until the end of 2016 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/ 2010/02/04/mpeg_la_h_264_codec_licence/), so I think it will remain the dominant codec. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
