Re: [Fsfe-uk] Adobe make Flash scripting Free Software with Mozilla Foundation

[Alex Hudson]

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.