Sponsored link
Serve your customers, not your servers, with VERIO Linux VPS. Full-access test-drive here.
| Weekly edition | Kernel | Security | Distributions | Search |
| Archives | Calendar | Subscribe | Write for LWN | LWN.net FAQ |
Still waiting for Flash
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 3:11 UTC (Wed) by robertknight (subscriber, #42536)In reply to: Still waiting for Flash by rfunk
Parent article: Still waiting for Flash
> Not before Silverlight grabs a significant toe-hold. :-( Leaving the politics to one side, the short-term odds of seeing a functional and compatible free software implementation of Silverlight are better than for Flash. Even if there was no Silverlight content on the web, Moonlight would be a useful platform for developing certain kinds of desktop applications (Games, Educational and more) in its own right. Much as some of us may loath its abuses, Flash solves a need. It provides an easy way to put together graphically rich interactive media which is convenient to distribute. If someone asked for an alternative libre tool which could do the same thing, until recently I'm not sure what I could point them to.
(Log in to post comments)
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 11:06 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
"Leaving the politics to one side, the short-term odds of seeing a functional and compatible free software implementation of Silverlight are better than for Flash." True for a limited definition of "free software". I'm much more willing to leave the anti-Microsoft politics aside than I am to leave patent law aside, and there's no way anyone but Microsoft and Novell will be able to legally distribute Moonlight without paying patent royalties to Microsoft. That's not free or open-source software.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 14:03 UTC (Wed) by Velmont (subscriber, #46433) [Link]
Hum? Software patents doesn't apply in the whole world. So saying that «nobody» can do it is false. I'll distribute Monolight legally with no problem.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 14:08 UTC (Wed) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]
Actually it is perfectly legal in most of the world (outside USA and Japan).
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 13, 2008 1:10 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]
Unless you want to exhibit at CeBit.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 14, 2008 10:53 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
I'm not quite sure if the LWN report about the CeBit inicident is correct. The police raided the booth for *devices*, not for software. None of the pure software shops have been addressed so far. I don't want to adress here if it's sensible to have patents on hardware implementations of algorithms; simply want to state that this is the case in Europe. And that seems to be the legal background for the CeBit incident, not any software patent.