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

[Walter Bender]

Presumably the "new standard" is SVG. SVG animation, AFAIK, is not yet
quite in the same league re Flash in terms of tools and support.

-walter

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Steve Holton <sph0lt0n at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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-- 
Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org