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Adobe has issued a DMCA removal request for a protocol they promised to open (linuxcentre.net)
28 points by swombat on May 22, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



Adobe always seems to me like some sort of schizophrenic or multiple-personalities nice-guy + psychopath.

One day, he's babysitting for the neighbour, watering your plants and taking out the trash, and talking about how he's going to fix the potholes in the street. The next day, he's walking out of your house with a blood-spattered knife, and you never see your dog again.

And I say this as someone whose start-up uses Flex heavily.

It's worrying. Can you rely on that kind of character?

More importantly, it's uncompetitive. Flex is still the best tool for a lot of RIA jobs at the moment, but the assorted collection of AJAX toolkits out there has been catching up, slowly but surely, and eventually they'll overtake Flex.

What a waste, considering what they could do with Flex if they actually sorted themselves out.


Adobe always seems to me like some sort of schizophrenic or multiple-personalities nice-guy + psychopath.

Welcome to Large Organization Inc. It's hard to synchronize the corporate message when there are too many contending departments, each being influenced by the segment of society they're most in contact with: the Community Relations department and its staff become more and more in tune with web users and developers, while sales department becomes more and more like the big-studio executives they hang out and correspond with all day.


The really aggravating thing about large companies (and I like Adobe) is that due to worries about IP and so on, it's virtually impossible to submit a feature idea and get a response. I know a great open-standard way they could improve the functionality of their video editing & compositing software (thus creating value and getting a further edge on their competitors), but short of ambushing a senior developer in the parking lot and shoving the use case and pseudocode into his/her hand, there's no easy way to do it :-)


Here's the key point from Adobe's announcement:

"To benefit customers who want to protect their content, the open RTMP specification will not include Adobe’s unique secure RTMP measures, nor will the license that accompanies the specification allow developers to circumvent such measures."

Adobe never planned to open RTMP all the way. It's open unless you do something that displeases Adobe.


From what I gather, the "secure" version isn't particularly good anyway (where by not particularly good, I mean not particularly good for copy-protected media, so actually terrible). Only people who irrationally want the "secure" form will have a problem with this, but these same people will probably irrationally want that part of the spec kept secret.


Open source developers are not entirely happy with this and mirrors of the rtmpdump app which got DMCA request are popping up:

http://lkcl.net/rtmp/




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