Taking the DMCA Biscuit

This is almost Jesuitical in its contorted logic:

Media Rights Technologies and BlueBeat.com have issued cease and desist letters to both companies and to Adobe Systems Inc and Real Networks -- which produce the Adobe Flash Player and Real Player respectively -- for actively avoiding their X1 SeCure Recording Control, which they said is an effective copyright protection system.

MRT and Bluebeat said the failure to use an available copyright protection solution contravenes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the manufacture of any product or technology designed to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work or protects the rights of copyright owners.

How do they come up with this stuff?

Adobe Flexes Its Open Source Muscles

As regular readers may have noticed, I'm not a big fan of Flash. But news that Adobe is open-sourcing Flex, its development framework for building Flash and Apollo-based applications, is, I suppose, marginally better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick:

Adobe is announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create Flex applications that run in any browser - on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux and on now on the desktop using “Apollo”.

Developers can use the Flex SDK to freely develop and deploy Flex applications using either Adobe Flex Builder or an IDE of their choice.

It looks like my musings have come true rather sooner than I expected.

Flash: Now With Improved Evilness

I've always said that Flash was turning the Internet into television, and now here's the final proof I was right:

But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) - allowing copyright holders to require the viewing of adverts, or restrict copying.

"Adobe has created the first way for media companies to release video content, secure in the knowledge that advertising goes with it," James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research said.

Content publishers are promised "better ways to deliver, monetize, brand, track and protect video content".

Interesting, of course, that no benefits for the user are mentioned here.

Pure evil.

Microsoft Sees the (Silver)Light

I suppose I ought to approve of Microsoft's new Silverlight:

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web.

In other words a Flash-killer. Well, maybe not, but at least it might nudge Adobe into opening up their technology. And how about this for progress:

Silverlight will support all major browsers on both Mac OS X and on Windows. Particular care is being taken to account for differences in platform and browser capabilities to ensure a consistent experience including experiences on FireFox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

OK, it's not quite GNU/Linux support, but Firefox at least seems to have made an impression.

Which Future for Adobe's Apollo?

I have mixed feelings about Adobe's new Apollo:

Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s [Rich Internet Applications].

On the one hand, it has the F-word in there, and as readers of this blog may know, I am totally allergic to Flash. On the other hand, this seems promising:

We spent a considerable amount of time researching a number of HTML rendering engines for use in Apollo. We had four main criteria, all of which WebKit met:

* Open project that we could contribute to
* Proven technology, that web developers and end users are familiar with
* Minimum effect on Apollo runtime size
* Proven ability to run on mobile devices

While the final decision was difficult, we felt that WebKit is the best match for Apollo at this time.

We shall see (now, if only the Delphic oracle were still around....)

Not Your Average Smith: Updated

As someone who spends a lot of time wandering around the free software world, I am still constantly amazed to happen upon interesting projects that I'd managed to overlook. A case in point is the splendidly-named Smith:

Smith is a freeware, cross-platform ColdFusion engine, written entirely in Java. Running on the top of Java Runtime Environment and Java Servlet Container, it can be virtually deployed on any operating system and work with any web server. Smith represents lightweight, yet reliable alternative to the existing ColdFusion servers.

For younger readers, who may not have come across ColdFusion, it was once (during those far-off Web 1.0 days) one of the most popular ways of putting together database-driven Web sites. It's now owned by Adobe. I'd not recommend it to anyone of delicate disposition, but it's nonetheless good to know that should you be so minded, you can now use a free version.

Update: Eagle-eyed readers (below - for which thanks) have pointed out that this is freeware, not free software. Apparently

It is also being seriously considered to open-source it.

OK, so consider this a post from a possible future: if and when Smith is open-sourced, it will be all the things I mentioned. Until then, please ignore this post and forgive my lapse.

The Openness Spreads...to Adobe's PDF

One campaign I have fought over the years has been for people to dump proprietary PDF files and use open HTML instead.

Clearly, I lost that one, but as time goes by, it's becoming less of a problem as Adobe moves PDF closer to being a totally open standard like HTML. Here's the latest news:

Most people know that PDF is already a standard so why do this now? This event is very subtle yet very significant. PDF will go from being an open standard/specification and defacto standard to a full blown du jure standard. The difference will not affect implementers much given PDF has been a published open standard for years. There are some important distinctions however. First – others will have a clearly documented process for contributing to the future of the PDF specification. That process also clearly documents the path for others to contribute their own Intellectual property for consideration in future versions of the standard. Perhaps Adobe could have set up some open standards process within the company but this would be merely duplicating the open standards process, which we felt was the proper home for PDF. Second, it helps cement the full PDF specification as the umbrella specification for all the other PDF standards under the ISO umbrella such as PDF/A, PDF/X and PDF/E. The move also helps realize the dreams of a fully open web as the web evolves (what some are calling Web 2.0), built upon truly open standards, technologies and protocols.

(Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)