Open at Adobe

There seems to be a lot of angst over the fact that the SWF specification is only covered by copyright. So lets take a moment to discuss this.

I'm not a lawyer, though I get to spend a lot of time around them in relation to standards and open source work. So here goes.

First, the specification is a document. It describes the SWF file format. It's like a book (albeit a short one). You, the reader don't need a license to read a book.

Open nearly any book and you'll see a copyright notice basically saying you can't copy the book. Same thing here

In fact, let's think of this as a cookbook. There are some pretty interesting recipes (SWF, FLV/F4V, AMF) that are there. You can certainly bake a SWF "cake" based on the recipe, and you don't need our permission to do so. You might have to buy some exotic ingredients that the recipe calls for to get it exactly like the lovely illustrative pictures, but you don't expect the cookbook to contain all your ingredients. And while some places provide ingredients for free (such as Tamarin or Flex SDK), not all ingredients are equally free (just as codecs aren't free even to us).

You buy your ingredients (or grow them, if you wish), you use the SWF recipe to bake it, and  voila, a SWF-powered application.

Now, as with nearly every product, specification, etc around, there's other interesting text.  Trademarks, references to other links, no offer of warranty on the contents. Again, absolutely normal. If you build it, you can't call it by our trademark names. If you use  someone else's materials, we aren't responsible for the contents.  (Here, think of using a oven to bake that cake.  We aren't responsible for bad eggs someone else sells you, nor if you mislabeled salt as sugar). And it's absolutely standard for no warranty to be extended.  Your "cake" is completely under your control, and we aren't responsible for how it turns out.

SO, no copyright traps. Feel free to write your own software that implements the specification. Since the specification does not include source code, you can't infringe our source code.

So, we'll look into ways to clarify the issues, but bottom line is that the specification is open and ready for you to cook up a storm.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

At the recent Internet World conference in London, Nitot of Mozilla made several remarks that included Adobe as an threat to the open nature of the internet.

Needless to say to those who watch the space, some of Nitot’s comments don’t reflect reality. I’d like to take a moment to clarify issues about Adobe Flash Player Adobe support for Linux, and Adobe open efforts.

Adobe delivered Flash Player 7 for Linux back in 2004. Flash Player 9 for Linux is now available and in 2007 Adobe committed to release future versions of Flash Player Linux simultaneously with Windows and Macintosh. I have Flash Player on my Macintosh OSX 10.5, Ubuntu 8.04, and Windows XP. Go here to see the version you have for yourself (http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507)

My version shows 9.0.124.0 on all of them. While I didn't test it, I'm told you can also add Solaris to that list as well.

It’s true we aren’t able to support every single Linux distribution and we know that Linux users want Flash Player for 64b Linux. But Adobe works hard to support the most popular distributions for Flash Player (and Adobe Reader) just as we do with the other operating systems.

Adobe may not deliver all of our software as open source but we firmly believe in the power of the open web. Flash Player isn’t open source. But Adobe, with a group of industry partners just announced the Open Screen Project. As our part of the project, Adobe removed all restrictions on using the file format that drives the Flash technologies, SWF and FLV/F4V. With the release of AMF in February along with BlazeDS, and an upcoming release of Flash Cast, Adobe is equally committed to making sure the web, at least our part, stays open.

Other open activities from Adobe include contributing the ActionScript Virtual Machine as open source to Mozilla’s Tamarin project. This is the same open source AVM in Flash Player 9 and Adobe AIR. Adobe is actively engaged in the Tamarin project. Providing Flex -- a free open source framework for building RIAs, which includes the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, and the ActionScript debugger from the SDK. Additionally, other major portions of Adobe AIR, such as Webkit (the HTML engine) and SQLite for the local database functionality are open source today.

The power of the web is found in its global reach, open exchange and access to all. Adobe recognizes that the extended web, reaching from devices to desktops needs to be equally open and as such is removing barriers that will enable content creation, applications and access to spread widely.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 10:43 PM | Permalink