Head London

The world of Flash Actionscript has seen a lot of changes in the last year. If this was any other year in Flash’s ten-year history as an interactive animation app, I’d probably be referring to the release of Flash 8, talk about its features, and convey my excitements and fears about the new release.

However, in my world, this is the year of OSFlash. There has been something of a revolution among serious Actionscript coders, and many people are now developing and using Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) Actionscript tools instead of grumbling about missing features in the We’re Here forums. An incredible number of initiatives has opened up a whole new world of Actionscript-based development: MTASC / Eclipse, ASWing, ActionStep, Red5, and many of the other projects on http://osflash.org are really making me fall in love with the SWF all over again.

It’s also got me fired up to release code under Free Software or Open Source licenses. The trouble is - which ones? What do I do about code that mine depends on that has an unknown license? Can I release this source once under the Mozilla Public License and then release a full application containing the same code under the GNU General Public License? Can I distribute an FLA that contains Macromedia components? And how does my code (potentially released as Free Software) relate, legally speaking, to the Macromedia class library on which it depends?

As a concrete example, I’d like to release the source code to the .SWF file at the top of this blog entry. There are a bunch of issues with it.

• It uses some Macromedia components, namely the Button, the TextInput, and the ComboBox.
• It depends on the MM class library. Does this affect whether it can be released under the GPL or MPL?
• It uses the glorious AnimationPackage for the animation effects. Since AnimationPackage is licensed under the MPL, does this mean my code must be licensed the same way? Keep in mind that my code can’t function without it.
• AnimationPackage itself relies on the work of two other developers, neither of whom have put any FLOSS licensing in place on their code. The http://dembicki.org has no licensing info at all, while the http://gskinner.com code specifically states that the code can’t be redistributed. I’m not using the GSkinner code, my mini-app just uses the Macromedia EventDispatcher class instead, but the licensing question remains somewhat the same.

Beyond the questions of reliance on code libraries, there is also the question of what I want to do with my code.

First, I’d like to release this Actionscript class, waterfall.as, under a BSD-style or MPL-style license, as a standalone thing that other developers can use, including in commercial projects, without the resulting apps necessarily needing to be Free Software. However, the code is also part of a larger application we have in development, which is a database-driven photo-display software rather like our project at http://www.bankfashion.co.uk I’d like this application to be GPL if and when we release it, so that if other companies start using and developing the code further, we see some benefit here at Headlondon. Can I release the same code under both licenses?

I’ll be exploring these questions over the next few weeks, and will post the results on this blog. And eventually, there will be a torrent of source available from our Flash development projects.