Around this time last year, Adobe open sourced its Flex framework for rich internet applications. Today Adobe announced the Open Screen project, which encompasses a number of things, probably most importantly, the removal of the license restrictions on the SWF file format used by Flash. The other aspects of the announcement relate to Adobe’s Flash Player, and while they are steps towards openness, Adobe’s player will remain closed. The importance of opening Adobe’s player has decreased because dropping the file format licensing should make things easier for the Gnash folks. The worry then is that we’ll end up with incompatible versions of Flash, which is in almost nobody’s interest. That’s probably the next problem that needs addressing.
It’s interesting to note that PDF seemed to do just fine as it became increasingly open to outside implementations. Let’s hope that the same happens with Flash.
The file format information was already available, but there’s still no information (let alone a spec) available on the scripting objects in flash, which is the hard part.
Hey Ted, I’d be curious how you’d help keep incompatible versions of Flash from happening. I think at this point no one really wants to do that so I’m not sure how much of a worry it is.
@James, I’m not sure what you mean by the scripting objects in Flash. Let me know and I’ll try to dig some info up for you.
=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com
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