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I've never worked at/near Adobe or the Flash source, but I figured 3rd party licensing was the case.
by theandrewbailey 9y ago
I've never worked at/near Adobe or the Flash source, but I figured 3rd party licensing was the case.
- ryandrake 9y agoI've always disliked this excuse. Software licenses are negotiated with third parties, not handed down from god. If Adobe really thought it would be advantageous and profitable to open source Flash, wouldn't they have gone back and renegotiated these licenses? "We'd love to do Xyz, bbbbbut licenses!" doesn't really make sense.
- jandrese 9y agoOr release a crippled version with with the commercial dependencies stubbed out and let the community bring it back up to speed? This could even slightly advantage Adobe as they could replace their licensed solutions with open source code and avoid the support contracts.
- jancsika 9y agoThat's a really novel idea. But I suppose it would all depend on how modular the codebase is. If there's any doubt about where Adobe's code ends and company X's code begins you'd be back to square one-- especially given that company X could easily exploit any ambiguity to scare hobbyist developers from an effort to fill in the stubs.
- megaman22 9y agoIf I recall correctly, some of the reference implementations of .NET were somewhat like this; I remember a story about how the GC was pretty naive, because the real one was patent-encumbered, or something along those lines.
- ternaryoperator 9y agoYou greatly underestimate how much work it is to negotiate licenses among major vendors, much less renegotiate an existing license.
- fenomas 9y ago> wouldn't they have gone back and renegotiated these licenses? Why assume they didn't try?