Still waiting for Flash

Posted Mar 12, 2008 3:11 UTC (Wed) by robertknight (guest, #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.

Still waiting for Flash

Posted Mar 12, 2008 11:06 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (4 responses)

"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 (guest, #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] (2 responses)

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] (1 responses)

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.