Open at Adobe

In the comments, several folks stated that the specification for SWF was incomplete. In discussions with the team defining such, they would love to hear from you what is missing:

“There are some mistakes and inconsistencies that we track so that we can improve the specs. If people know of specific issues, they are welcome to email FlashFormat@adobe.com. We always appreciate that.”

So, please folks, send them reasonable comments and corrections, or requests for the missing information.

OKay, after the fiasco of the spam filter, I’m processing comments. It’s always interesting to realize the command of english portrayed by the community.

First, I don’t own the code. I’m summarizing the comments into the buckets and will work to get answers.

Second, there are some things in the comments that were news to me. I’m researching them.

Third, I’m not ignoring this thread. I have to run people to the ground, explain to them the comment and get answers. Please give me (and us) a bit of time.

Apologies to all commenters. All comments got routed to Spam. I hope that I got them all back. will start parsing through them

Flash is open.

No, it’s not pure open source. It’s not a perfect standard with national bodies arguing over each must, will, or shall.

But in follow the comments from our CTO’s posting “Open access to Content and Apps”, I noticed that there are comments about Flash not being an “open” technology and questions about why we don’t open source the Player, so I thought I’d jump in and provide some details to help clear up some misconceptions and explain how open we are with the Flash Platform.

(Might I also suggest you check out this “Open at Adobe” video on YouTube.)

The main reason we can’t release Flash Player as open source is because there is technology in the Player that we don’t own, such as the industry standard hi-def video codec, H.264. Adobe pays for that codec so video plays reliably worldwide, across browsers and OS’s. So we make it as open as we can – by releasing the specifications.

The Flash file format (SWF) specifications are open and unrestricted, so any company – even Apple – can build their own Flash Player if they want. Also freely available are related specifications for the Flash ecosystem: RTMP, FLV/F4V, AMF, and MCD.

Flex – the framework to make rich Internet app (RIAs) is open source; the Text Layout Framework, which is the same text engine in Flash Player driving typography, is open source; OSMF is an open source framework for building video deployment solutions using the Flash Platform. Tamarin, the virtual machine powering Flash Player is open sourced at Mozilla.

For more info on Flash Platform openness as well as to follow all the open initiatives at Adobe, visit opensource.adobe.com.