Open at Adobe

Recently, Kevin Lynch (Adobe CTO), did a interview with eWeek which discussed open source.

A related discussion on Ostatic.com is very insightful and hits the high points.

But an issue comes up in a comment on the Ostatic article.

by Richard on Sep. 26, 2008

Why not ask Adobe if they are going to remove the restriction (in their Flash PLayer license) that anyone who has ever installed the Flash Player cannot work on development of open source alternatives such as Gnash. This is the biggest single change they could make to be more open source friendly.

Okay, we give up. What the heck is being discussed here? I can't find anything in the license that says "Using the product prevents you from working on an open source project". Nor can my legal types, internal and external to the company. Nor can other open source types that I've asked.

The agreement does state you won't reverse engineer the code. Okay, maybe that is confusing the issue. However, the statement is actually pretty clear: You can't modify, adapt, translate, or create derivative works based on Adobe software. You can't reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or do other things to discover the Flash Player source code.

But this doesn't mean you can't go work on an project like Gnash, it just puts a limit on what you can do with our software.

Or could you be referring to the old SWF license that blocked using the SWF specification for the purposes of building a SWF player? You know, we removed that restriction in May 2008. the SWF specification (and FLV/F4V, AMF, FlashCast) are all now published for use without restrictions. No restrictions. ( but keep in mind that there are copyright and trademark issues that continue in place).

So, unless someone can point me to a specific clause in the Flash Player EULA, I think it safe to close this issue.