Open at Adobe

Do you know about the "Open" initiatives at Adobe. And just how open is the Flash Platform? Very.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Peter Elst]

It seems to be popular to dismiss Adobe's open initiatives -- truth be told they're doing more than most leading tech companies in opening up their core technology.

The Flash Player virtual machine has been donated to the Mozilla foundation and is open source. No more licensing restrictions for distributing the Flash Player on devices and you're now not prohibited from creating your own SWF playback plugin.

[Peter Elst]

Reasons for not having a complete open source Flash Player in my opinion is more a practical one -- i.e. Adobe using third party proprietary audio/video codecs and font rendering technology in there that they can't make available.

[Shruti Marathe]

hehe



[sprayinak47]

Adobe has a small problem arising; HTML5. Flash is becoming less common place for designing websites, but rather delivering video and audio content. It's my belief that Adobe should focus on mobile applications. Many designers are comfortable digging through AS2/AS3. I'm not that confident with Objective:C, or Java/Brew. Adobe could give us a single tool to publish kick ass applications across all handhelds, TV's, gaming systems, etc. A single language, a single toolset, millions of devices.

[Adnan Doric]

Facts:

- Flash Player remains closed source

- Flex SDK is NOT completely open (just enough to say "hey we opened it")

...and (this one is hilarious) :

- Flash builder 4 is not even cross-platform (only very old alpha version of FB3 for Linux)