Markus Thielmann

Open Flash Charts history:

And it’s really free?!
Yes. Once upon a time I had to deal with a company who sell flash charting components, their component had a bug that I needed fixing, so I emailed them about it asking when it’d be fixed. (Remember that I had paid real money for this software.) They were so incompetent, rude and obnoxious that after three or four weeks of emails I thought to myself “I could learn Flash and Actionscript and write my own charting component, release it as Open Source, host it on sourceforge and build up a community of helpful coders faster than they can fix a single bug.” And that is what I did. And that is why it is free. I guess the moral of the lesson is: don’t piss off your customers.

[Discovered by Thomas Vander Stichele: Free software at work]

A few day ago, I reported how to work around a nasty bug in Ubuntu Hardy Heron related to Adobes Flash player.

Adobe today removed some license restrictions on it's flash related specification, which were formerly present to stop developers from creating flash player clones while using Adobes specifications.

The "Open Screen Project" covers in detail:

* Removing licenses from SWF (multimedia and vector-graphics)
* Removing licences from FLV/F4V (video)
* Offering device porting layer APIs for Flash Player
* Publishing specifications for the Flash Cast protocol
* Publishing specifications for the AMF protocol (exchange data with a database)

While it seems like a huge step towards an open source (and hopefully more stable) flash player, the concerning projects (swfdec and Gnash) are quite reserved with their statements.

While part of the Gnash developers still fear legal issues in general and especially patent issues, swfdec head Benjamin Otte states, that for his project "it means pretty much nothing. Swfdec already implements everything that is written down in that specifications".

Back in 2007, Rob Savoye expressed a comprehensible whish:

we'd love to see a public statement that Gnash developers won't be subject to a lawsuit.

I guess that a single statement regarding legal issues with open sourced flashplayers would had more impact for the open source community than the Open Screen Project currently has.

Ed Burnette posted a more detailed report on the background of Adobes decision: "Adobe opens up Flash, but leaves out Google and Apple".

According to some sources, the One-Laptop-Per-Child Project is thinking about switching from Linux (Red Hat) to Microsoft Windows XP.

[Nicholas Negroponte] lamented that an overriding insistence on open-source had hampered the XOs, saying Sugar "grew amorphously" and "didn't have a software architect who did it in a crisp way." For instance, the laptops do not support Flash animation, widely used on the Web.

"There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community," he said. "One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist."

Even so the last sentence is true, I don't get what the "open-source community" has to do with a lack of project management and resources at the OLPC Project?

ShowMeDo is yet another open source video tutorial site. What makes it superior to other sites is it's huge selection on topics, ranging from beginner tutorials to advanced software development.

There are still some flaws. I'm missing information on intellectual property rights, especially which rights ShowMeDo claims and which license the authors intend to use for their content. Additional to that, a decent designer would be a good choice, and some use of standards would be great.

But other than that, it's a good site with great content on it. Thanks to Ian Ozvald and Kyran Dale for providing this free (and ad-free) service to the community.

Original location: 'Practical Episode - User Interface Basics' at ShowMeDo from the Ubuntu category.

Thanks to Og Maciel for mentioning it at Planet Ubuntu.

The first time I saw a Hackergotchi, I was hoping that never ever I would need one too.

But since I highly appreciate Tiago 'gouki' Farias "UbuntuWeblogs" project, I'm out of excuses.

If someone is able to crop the image better then I did, you're welcome to help me out. :-)