Phasor Burn

Copyrights and patents are temporary restraints of trade for the purpose of encouraging creativity, not permanent rights, and any set of extensions that creates a de facto situation to the contrary is unconstitutional, especially as it applies retroactively to previously-protected works, where the incentive has long been given and spent.

A rich public domain is as much a necessity for creativity as protection from it. Extending copyrights to one’s lifetime plus 70 years is well beyond the pale that the framers thought reasonable.

Read More Here

This is the crux of the problem with the USA patent and copyright law and enforcement thereof. The entire article is worth a close read, Richard gets it bang-on.

Yes, this is relevant in Canada also, as big brother USA leans on it’s friends and not-so-friends to enact similar (bad) legislation.

I like this guy.

Open Data Formats + Open Protocols = Open Standards

Open Standards = Interoperability

Interoperability = No Vendor Lock In.

Understanding WTF your app is putting on the wire is the first step in this chain.

Check out the demos link on the right hand side of the OpenLaszlo site.

Will OpenLaszlo give Macromedia Flex (or even Java Webstart) a run for the money?

I see them as being functionally equivalent, from the end-user perspective. OpenLaszlo is depending on Flash being bundled with Microsoft XP SP2 to make adoption easier. Ride the coattails of MSFT . . . can’t really fault them.

Of course I’d like to see an opensource Flash viewer as well. Why make anything proprietary at all, except for the data and services around implementing, customizing, and supporting open source for your commercial project foobar 1.0 ?

The Laszlo Presentation Server (LPS) is a Java servlet that compiles LZX applications into executable binaries for targeted run-time environments. Laszlo currently targets the Flash Player. The LPS compiles LZX applications into SWF bytecode for the Flash Player, serves and caches these compiled applications to any Web browser enabled with Flash 5 or later, and proxies application requests for back-end XML data sources and web services.

Yes, the code is all in “XML” and we all know that can be a bit … wordy or cumbersome to use even with a good xml editor. I’d rather see a base language that compiled down to the xml description that then got served up by the Laszlo Presentation Server.

Why make the developer’s live harder than necessary?

(The same could be said for the verbosity required of full blown J2EE development, and the growing movement away from J2EE to lighter weight straight-ahead java for things that do not need all the bells and whistles of J2EE)

More at Laszlo Goes Open Source, and Coming soon: Laszlo (presentation server optional)

Steven Webster from iteration::two has also written a good opinion article comparing Laszlo and Macromedia Flex.