Adobe make Flash scripting Free Software with Mozilla Foundation

Alex Hudson home at alexhudson.com
Tue Nov 7 13:01:33 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 12:46 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > Now the only part that bothers me is that this likely means the Mozilla 
> > license will be used, which is AFAIK GPL-incompatible, which means that
> > Konqueror will not get native flash in the foreseeable future now.
> > Especially because I think that this move will cause work on the free
> > flash player front (Gnash, and I believe there were others) to slow down.
> 
> Are Adobe and Mozilla helping or hurting other free software players?

In terms of "Tamarin" (which is the Mozilla name for the Adobe
contribution, unless I'm wrong) the licensing is the standard Mozilla
license, but that's the LGPL / GPL / MPL tri-license, not the MPL alone:

	http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/

So, I would say Adrian is probably worrying about nothing - the code is
GPL'd (as an option).

It's questionable how much help Tamarin actually is - while undoubtedly
useful, it only solves a small part of the Free Flash problem - but I'm
pretty sure that it's not harmful. I would also say it's unlikely anyone
working on Free Flash would start developing Tamarin per se either -
they may well use it, but they'd be worrying about different parts of
the problem. 

Cheers,

Alex.




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