"Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings the Blues”
is becoming a huge critical success, and may even succeed
financially, which is unusual for any independent film, but
virtually unprecedented for free culture films (“Sita”
was released under the CC By-SA). There’s only one sad thing
about this for free software fans, and that’s that
“Sita” was made using proprietary software, and the
“source code” is in a proprietary format: Adobe
Flash’s “FLA” format, to be precise. Paley has
posted these files on the Internet Archive, but she doesn’t
know how to translate them into any free software friendly format
(and neither do I). Can you help?
"Like Sita trapped by the evil Ravana, the source data for
“Sita Sings the Blues” is trapped in a proprietary file
format which makes it very hard for derivatives to be made using
free software tools. Want to help rescue it?
"There’s no question that Flash is the leading tool for
free culture animators at this time. I wish I could say it was
Synfig or KToon or some other free software tool, but it
isn’t. “Sita Sings the Blues” is only the most
visible case."