Cooking with SWF, and the understanding of copyright
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.
Comments
Glass is half-full. I can be an optimist about Adobes direction/velocity, but aspects of these moves deserve scrutiny.
You guys control the runtime, and RTMP/AMF are agnostic enough for delivery for pretty much any codec you wanted to implement in the player; I think that means you guys control what codecs you choose to use/license. There is an opportunity cost from switching from Sorenson to h264 that makes that move a zero-sum to actually going to or creating a royalty-free codec. The only cure to that path chosen is (a) phased open-sourcing the non-codec parts of the flash player source over time (do it, it will give you guys a warm feeling inside, and won't compromise your revenue streams), and (b) supporting an optional royalty-free codec in equal standing to the vendor-neutral, but RAND licensed h264.
One thing that Adobe needs to pick up on WRT open-source: there has to be community, and there has to be uptake in terms of interoperability work with adjacent communities, without such, you have only switched the walls on your garden to tempered glass. This has been my experience in supporting Flex developers where I work (I would much rather they use JSON than AMF over the wire, becuase there isn't an Adobe-only flavor to it -- it does not matter if AMF is an open-spec now, it has no community other than a handful of people who already reverse-engineered it prior to Adobe's "opening," and it is not nearly as interoperable or approachable as a binary format for people working in adjacent technology ecospheres to Adobe tools -- perfect is the enemy of good in this case).
-Sean
Posted by: Sean Upton | May 7, 2008 06:49 PM
Thanks for this post Dave! I think this explanation makes it a lot easier to understand from practical stand point what we can do with Open Screen. Yay for analogies!
Posted by: Andre Charland | May 13, 2008 08:29 AM