CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

Sadly I don't think so, but it's about time that the Open Source community get to work on something like that

I think the player is all you get for free

I think macromedia has too much a monopoly in the web-animation field... someone needs to knock them down off their $700-per-copy throne!

Would an open source flash development system be legal?

Straylight wrote:Would an open source flash development system be legal?

probably not, im sure macromedia would be all over that if it happened, since they own all the copyrights and patents for flash

Wouldn't specifically have to be Flash.... some similar standard with players/plug-ins for the various OSes would work.... little like GIMP is to PhotoShop.

the only difference is that gimp and photoshop use other formats (bmp jpg gif)
but macromedia flash only makes .fla and .swf and both of those are propritary to macromedia

Wouldn't specifically have to be Flash.... some similar standard with players/plug-ins for the various OSes would work.... little like GIMP is to PhotoShop.

That's a very interesting idea -- Flash is a pretty good system and it even has its own scripting language. Imagine something similar to Flash but with an open source language behind it. It could end up being quite powerful.

I expect that web developers would grab hold of the idea quite quickly as well (no need to pay for software), so propogating the plugin on people's machines would be less of an issue as more sites start to use it.

EDIT: The existance of this site is interesting:
http://www.openswf.org/

I wonder if Macromedia stuck a patent on the idea of a full featured SWF development platform. If a third party GNU one popped up, it'd be great.