On wednesday the 19th of June Tom Harwood of Macromedia Server Products, CFML Language Development posted a Lisence Approval Request for the “Macromedia Open Source License” to the Open Source Initiative
You can follow the discussion/thread at the Opensource.org mailinglist. The reception of the request has been good, although the license in many ways appear as a vanity license, as pointed out in the discussion of the request and by Steve Mallett that picked up the posting to the list.
In my opinion this is a good first step. hopefully Macromedia will go along with using the Common Public License, I tend to agree with David Johnson (Usermode.org) in his worries that the CPL license could end up as several hundred identical CPL’s with just the name of the license changed.
SwfNews also picked up on the story, and the following discussion focused on what Macromedia might want to open source. There were suggesions that Macromedia might open source the Flash “remoting server” or maybe the Flash player, but I think the safest bet was that of John Dowdell, that Macromedia is looking into open sourcing extensions to the ColdFusion Markup Language.
just a quick fyi, there are a couple of open source tools used within CFMX included the Rhino javascript parses, used for ServerSide ActionScript, and Axis, use for web services (of which Macromedia is also a major contributor and developer).
I am aware that Macromedia is using several open source parts in some of their products. And have been contributing to that. Which I think is great. It seems to be like it has been the old Allaire that has brough that into Macromedia with the merger of the two.
Jeremy Allaire shared some information with me and the readers of Flashmagazine.com last year in the interview we did at FlashForward 2001 NYC.
Here is a link to a HTML version of the interview, curtesy of Google :-)
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:adtSY0-6PdUC:www.flashmagazine.com/pdf/JeremyAllaireInterview.pdf+Jeremy+Allaire+Jarle+Dahl+Bergersen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
The interview is also available at Flashmagazine.com in a Flash version:
http://www.flashmagazine.com/?art043.swf
And as a PDF file, for download and printing (or reading on a PDA):
http://www.flashmagazine.com/pdf/JeremyAllaireInterview.pdf
Jeremy says in the interview:
“a lot of the XML infrastructure in ColdFusion and JRun is open source, based on open source XML parsers and transformation tools and other things, and that’s great because there are a lot of people that need that, it’s a clear community oriented technology, so that makes a lot of sense”