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Mike Champion wrote:
>
> Given that Macromedia (unlike, ahem, others that come to mind) don't seem
> to want to use their monopoly in one area to drag us kicking and screaming
> into their future monopolies in other areas, what besides the "political
> and religious" objections are there to using Flash for rich internet apps?
Does wanting to own your own data count as a political/religious
objection?
An annotation in the article [1] states that "Macromedia's
SWF file format is freely documented", but reading the
actual license [2] we find that:
| Pursuant to the terms and conditions of this License, you
| are granted a nonexclusive license to use the Specification
| for the sole purposes of developing Products that output SWF.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^
So if you want to write a Product that *reads* SWF --
say a player, a tool to convert your old SWF files
to some other format, to search and index them,
or anything else you might want to do with your data --
you have to reverse-engineer the format.
No thanks.
I don't have any strong objections to proprietary software,
but proprietary file formats are another matter altogether.
[1] http://www.oreilly.com/editors/
[2] http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/open/licensing/fileformat/license2.html
--Joe English
jenglish@flightlab.com
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