Sean Walther's Blog

Adobe Responds: Flash isn’t Open Source, but we’re trying

A few days ago I had posted Apple, Adobe, Flash, iPhone, iPad and Open Source with reference to a debate on various blogs.  The debate is whether Flash will ever go open source, should they, and what it means to the Apple / iPhone / iPad contingent.

Adobe came back with the blog post Following the open trail, by Dave McAllister.

To quote the article:

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.

Some Open Source projects that Adobe has contributed to:

• as3corelib
• BlazeDS
• Cairngorm
• CMap Resources
• Durango
• Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP)
• Flash-Ajax Video Component
• Flex SDK
• flexlib
• FlexPMD
• FlexUnit (unit testing framework for Flex and AS3, similiar to JUnit)
• Generic Image Library
• Mapping Resources for PDF
• Open Source Media Framework
• Adobe Media Gallery
• Adobe Source Libraries
• Tamarin (the open engine for ActionScript)
• Text Layout Framework (the engine for displaying text in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5)
• Webkit (the engine for Chrome and Safari)

Given the response from Adobe on why Flash cannot be open source, it makes sense.  The video codec technology must be licensed, which doesn’t allow true open sourcing of the Flash engine.

Tags: Actionscript, Adobe, Adobe Media Gallery, Adobe Source Libraries, AIR, AS3, as3corelib, blazeds, cairngorm, cmap resources, Dave McAllister, durango, extensible metadata platform, Flash, Flash-AJAX video component, Flex, Flex SDK, flexlib, FlexPMD, FlexUnit, Generic Image LIbrary, GIL, iPad, iPhone, Mapping Resources for DPF, Open Source, Open Source Media Framework, Tamarin, Text Layout Framework, Webkit, XMP

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