Tried with Windows Media Player and worked fine.

Which file is this happening on for you? The .m4v or the .avi or both?

Intalio’s Community Edition FAQs say “Our Commercial Open Source Model is defined at http://itredux.com/2007/01/02/on-intalio-and-open-source/” If you look at that link, you’ll see a clear and unambiguous commitment to releasing the Community Edition under a modified (attribution) MPL in 2007.

That same article makes great play of how it is important to be able to trust OSS vendors to deliver. Sadly, despite sending their site visitors to that link, they seem no closer to releasing the promised MPL edition.

In case you hadn’t looked at it, not only is the source not provided with the Community Edition, but the Designer WILL NOT WORK in full without authenticating the user against Intalio’s servers every time you want to use it. There isn’t a decent privacy policy that I can see, so we can’t be sure that Intalio aren’t collecting detailed usage information (or even entire codebases) from their users at the same time.

Oh and that CE license? It can be terminated at any time by Intalio. So if they think your application is making you money, they can demand you buy a $10k pa (minimum) commercial license or require you to delete the lot. And the license is VERY vague on what you can and cannot do - it is possible that you could not, for instance, use the CE as the back-end to a site running, say, a SAAS application.

Whilst I applaud Intalio’s donations of code to the various projects they have supported, like you it is the rhetoric which is disturbing when viewed in the context of the reality of the arrangements (licensing and otherwise).

FWIW I like the product, just not the way it is being handled. It is certainly the case that I wouldn’t want to deploy Community Edition in any “live”, external-facing scenario, in fact anywhere that Intalio could see it or control it.

I’d like to point out that in just a few week Active Endpoints will be shipping with the ActiveVOS 6.0 release “ActiveVOS Designer for Business Analysts”, and integrated BPMN modeling and simulation with “ActiveVOS Designer”. We’re targeting the former as the name suggests to Business Analysts and application architects they work with. The modeling and simulation components that ships with “ActiveVOS Designer” are on the other hand are targeted at the developer and the application architect they work with.

Our goals were simple: help document requirements, and drive Business and IT collaboration. As usual, the team outdid itself. Why stop at modeling and simulation when you can add KPI and Goals; export to various document formats; make seamless the transition from the “model” to “implementation” and vice-versa, and finally directly incorporate people and services up front.

Not only will it allow you to take input from an Analyst presenting you with a Visio diagram, it also will allow you to import (i.e. migrate) UML2 and XPDL, and BPEL of course.

We’re pumped for 6.0

Luc

And as I responded back to you in email, we are not trying to be jingoistic. We do, however, believe that a country with a GDP as large as the US’s should not be so technologically behind emerging countries. This editorial wasn’t about US “hegemony” but instead about US competitiveness.

Bruce, I hear you that the term “business user” is fungible for many different roles in an enterprise. When we talk about business users working in a visual orchestration system, we mean people who are likely to be documenting in tools like Visio today and who are responsible for working with IT to develop apps. Where they are organizationally varies from company to company, but I agree with you they aren’t necessarily the ultimate end user of the app.

Nick: I didn’t mean to imply that you speak for Microsoft. And I disagree that enterprise architectures have done much — or will do much — for the ultimate business end user. That’s because a typical piece-parts architecture is so darn hard for developers to use that nothing gets done on it and they remain fat, dumb and happy in Java. (OK, some small percentage are doing apps in C# (-: )

Our concept of a visual orchestration is focused on precisely this problem: give developers an integrated, all-in-one toolset that works, is standards-based and which promotes collaboration with the business users.

A VOS renders the debate about which ESB, which registry, how to secure messages irrelevant. With VOS, developers get to the heart of the problem: creating modern apps.

I’m a fan of good tools, and it sounds like you have a fairly good product. I’d like to correct one potential misinterpretation that your readers may get from all of this: I do no speak for any Microsoft product or even for the Microsoft corporation. I am simply a vocal guy who happens to be an Enterprise Architect at Microsoft.

Believe it or not: I’m quick to agree with Bruce about one statement that he made: business users do not develop ‘executable’ anything. Not executable BPMN nor BPEL (which is by definition, executable). They need a model developer (emphasis on “developer”) to create the application for them… even in your tool.

And that won’t change. I’m not implying that there is anything at all wrong with your tool. To be fair, I have not reviewed it, and I hope you forgive me that I don’t have the time to do so. I’m not criticizing your tool. I’m simply pointing out that, as a general purpose tool, you are effectively creating a general purpose programming environment. Your environment, and approach, does not make the assumption that you can go without code, but it is still a programming environment.

Executable business process management has a place, but for us to see the ability to create a general purpose application with BPM as the primary value point, we will have to see a rich environment that includes all of the business information and a huge ‘library’ of functionality. That can be done. Your app, along with a very complete and consistent enterprise architecture that includes services, MDM, and a rich data environment, has a good shot at building that app. On the other hand, the conditions that make that possible are uncommon.

And that is why I feel that BPM tools will fail to live up to the hype. Because the incremental value that they add is small compared to the cost of developing the rich data and functional environment in which they will prosper.