Sapotek open their Rich Internet Application code and art

Sapotek used DebConf7 to announce the opening of their Desktop Software as a Service offerings.

SaaS is not normally opened - the various licences don't require you to hand over the source if you are not distributing the code for end users to run. Keep the code running on your own computers, and you can keep the code private. Sapotek - a company primarily based in, and providing services to, Third World countries - are much more idealistic than that.

Similiarly, the spirit of the 'free software' movement looks for more than just as much openness and freedom as you can get away with.

Sapotek have therefore licensed their code software under the 'Affero' terms, which makes additional demands of remotely served software, to bring the obligations on the people who run the code more in line with the obligations they'd have of they ran the software locally. And is not just the code that Sapotek opened - they freed the art they have created too, under a Creative Commons licence.

One of their aims at their event was to give a "call-to-arms to encourage programmers with the necessary skills to provide an alternative to Flash either in the form of Gnash or any other alternative."

They started out coding the front end in DHTML, and ended up moving to Flash for reasons of development productivity. Flash is not open. So... what should they do? Continue to wait for a suitably productive alternative to appear? Become as big and rich as Google from some alternative product, so they have the pockets deep enough to develop their Desktop SaaS as a vanity project?

I applaud Sapotek for opening up everything that is theirs to open up. I applaud them for viewing usability as important, and I applaud them for opening up more than just their code.

I don't think it helps anyone's cause to berate them for having moved reluctantly to Flash.

One of the key questions now for me is - what can be done with Flash? Where is the equivalent for Flash of the projects to open .Net, Windows and Java?