[Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)

[Steve Holton]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Rob Savoye <rob at welcomehome.org> wrote:
> Carol Lerche wrote:
>
>   Once again I get depressed about everyone's dependence on proprietary
>  formats, even for worthy causes. :-(
>
>
>  > specific case of Adobe flash, it would be excellent if someone friendly to
>  > the project could approach Adobe and ask that they allow the plugin to be
>  > packaged for distribution during school deployments.
>
>   Adobe has been approached many times by various OLPC people in the
>  past about this... which is why the XO ships Gnash instead. Rather than
>  continuing to have a nasty dependency on a large company with
>  proprietary formats that prefers to make money from software licensing,

(translation: we want to avoid this...)

>  we'd do better to support Gnash getting more compatible faster.

But here you lost me.

Gnash will *never* be fully compatible with Flash because the closer
Gnash gets to being a viable free Flash replacement, the more
incentive there is for Adobe to change the Flash specification in a
way to break compatibility.

Two decades in the Microsoft format wars should have taught that
lesson to everyone by now. Look how long (and how much) it's taken ODF
to get where it's at.

OTOH, the XO offers us an opportunity to create a new standard among
an audience which has no investment in the old.  But this is a limited
opportunity.

(The point is largely moot. Adobe realizes the market will be very
limited for Flash-type services among third-world XO users with
limited internet connectivity and bandwidth. But other proprietary
vendors such as Intel and Microsoft have much more to lose if the
children of the world are exposed to non-proprietary technology by the
millions. It should be clear that Microsoft's generous offer to port
Windows XP to the XO is motivated by exactly this business rationale.)

-- 
Steve Holton
sph0lt0n at gmail.com