Aral Balkan

The SWF format is now totally open. Rejoice!

This is big: Adobe is removing restrictions on the use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications as part of their new Open Screen Project 2008.

When Mark Doherty emailed me to tell me about his post on Adobe's Open Screen Project 2008, I wasn't expecting such an important announcement.

Along with the opening of the SWF format, Adobe has also removed the licensing fees it used to charge for the Flash Player.

What does that mean for us? It means Flash _everywhere_. It means you picked the right platform to develop your skills on. It means Flash will be around for a long, long time! :)

Additionally, Adobe will be publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player, the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol, and the AMF protocol.

This is something that myself and others in the Flash community have been pushing for for a long time and I'm very happy to see that Adobe is finally confident enough in the strength of the Flash Platform to take this step. Bravo!

Update: A random thought: I wonder how much Apple's stance against Flash on iPhone contributed to this. Looking at the members of the Open Screen Project, you see that the major handset manufacturers are all on board. (Or was it Microsoft's mobile Silverlight initiative?)

Further reading:

Adobe has released a video and further information for developers and Ryan Stewart shares his thoughts also.

Comments

• In fact, the more I think about it, the less interesting this announcement is. How is Flash 'open' as a consequence of this announcement? Who gets to decide the future of the platform? Adobe? Anybody else? How is this subject to the kind of rigorous evaluation that (for instance) the W3C's open standards are? I'm not saying that this move is bad, but it shouldn't be assumed that the various benefits that come from using open technologies (longevity, wide adoption) will automatically apply here.

  by Ben Darlow on 2008-05-01 11:31:59

• I don't know if the iPhone has helped at all but I'm glad for where Adobe is moving. Could you imaging all of these a few years ago? Seems that Adobe is giving to the platform what is need and deserve.. ;)

  by savvasmalamas on 2008-05-01 16:17:40

• Cool. Someone could finally hack together an open source Flash player with decent graphics performance. :P

  by Hendrik Mans on 2008-05-01 16:10:43

• I generally make it a personal policy not to promote my blog on others' sites but I just posted a different view of the project and would love to hear thoughts and opinions of others. If you feel so inclined the post is at http://www.returnundefined.com/2008/05/is-the-open-screen-project-a-good-thing.

  by Ben Clinkinbeard on 2008-05-02 05:14:49

• The BIG new would be Flex Builder free.

  by Briga on 2008-05-04 13:42:03

• @Briga, If the cost of Flex Builder is an issue for you, get yourself over http://www.flashdevelop.org and download a copy of FlashDevelop 3. It is a free, open source, and superbly implemented Flasg/ Flex AIR IDE.

  by David Arno on 2008-05-08 05:56:40

• I hope this means Apple will start using Flash on the iPhone...

  by Rob on 2008-05-01 11:13:46

• I am not sure if the licensing fees are removed full stop or for devices only. Can someone confirm?

  by Stefan Richter on 2008-05-01 13:09:14

• @Ben @Wolf I think you both misunderstand this a bit. This is not just about players for the mobile space - it's for ANY device! I interviewed Dave McAllister from Adobe specifically about how open this will be: http://www.flashmagazine.com/News/detail/open_screen_project_opens_adobe_even_more/ In reality it means that Open Source projects like Gnash is no longer "illegal" and that anyone can make Flash players that provide special hooks for their platform. For instance, Nintendo can add support for all the controller buttons and they don't need to ask anyone about it. SonyEricsson also has some cool stuff going on related to this: http://www.flashmagazine.com/News/detail/sony_ericsson_to_extend_flash_lite_capabilities/ I think this is as open as the Flash Player will ever become and that it'll make Flash omnipresent on all platforms given some time... J

  by Jensa on 2008-05-01 13:18:40

• @Wolf: hopefully what this means for Flash Lite is that it will be either quietly retired, or preferably, publicly executed. It was a ridiculous idea in the first place, especially as it is AS2-based and you (AFAIK) have to buy Flash Pro CS3 to get a player that runs on Windows/ OSX. Rejoice for FL is dead (hopefully).

  by David Arno on 2008-05-01 15:05:15

• Just to put in a point, here. With SWF open, and people free to build their own players, it's likely that Microsoft will make the SWF format compatible on SilverLight. It's also likely that others will want to do similar things, such as companies like Google and Sun providing support for SWF on similar runtimes. There could very well be other large companies, who until now, have lain dorment waiting for such a move before grabbing hold of the technology and boosting their own player or SWF consuming device. Who knows, I'm reaching here. ;) Well, now we've reached this important milestone, let's start campaiging to get the Flash player made open source!!! :D

  by Lee McColl Sylvester on 2008-05-01 16:22:07

• This is excellent ! Every time I think I've figured out where to go with open source Flash projects (such as JavaSWF) Adobe pulls something like this. Rather than trying to figure out how to react (implementing a usable SWF renderer is hard) I'm just going to create a machine-readable model of the SWF format and let others generate SWF parsing code from that. Once the FLA format is opened up in the next version of the Flash IDE (it will be zipped XML + assets) the whole Flash authoring workflow will be a playground for open source. Good times ahead !

  by Nick Main on 2008-05-01 17:45:04

• At first, I thought "you posted this one month late".

  by Joshua Goodwin on 2008-05-14 17:08:48

• @Stefan From what I understood, all fees will be removed. And - let's be honest - my portable Mac is a device as good as any other ;-)

  by Jensa on 2008-05-01 13:27:52

• I have to side with Ben on some of this. Call me cynical, but from the mobile perspective it could be exciting, but it's also quite vague. It sounds like they are going to provide a unified runtime that works exactly the same on all devices (yeah right), and more importantly which the manufacturers of devices don't have to pay a licence for. I'm not going to get started about the fact that that's what they should have done about 5 years ago, but there are plenty of questions. What is going to happen to FlashLite for example? If the future is a unified Flash Player/AIR runtime (from version 11 onwards that is), and that's supposed to be integrated into mobile devices, it spells the end for FlashLite, which is a completely different player at the moment. Not a bad thing technologically, because FL is lagging behind, but that takes the whole fragmentation problem in mobile another step further, where we have an 'new OpenFlash vs. old FlashLite' legacy problem. Also, if manufacturers are able to create their own Flash runtime, we might end up with the same problem as with JavaME, which let them implement their own JVMs with sometimes disastrous consequences and huge fragmentation. And who knows who's actually going to implement this new runtime - Google's OpenHandsetAlliance announcement, complete with new OS/platform (Android) and SDK was signed by plenty of the same OEMs that are part of Adobe's OpenScreen press release. I suppose we need more detail. The idea is a good one, and was kind of logical after Adobe merged the 'Mobile and Devices' and 'Platform' business units last month. But it might have more impact on the desktop and possibly set top boxes than on mobile phones in the short/medium term. Or am I just so jaded with over-excited press releases that I can't see the wood for the trees...?

  by Wolf Luecker on 2008-05-01 12:43:38

• I believe that for flash developers it will become more easy to create non-pc content. Like jensa said: Anyone can add special support for their device. For mobile developers the Capuchin project is great so they can start creating mobile applications with a cool UI via FlashLite and extend the services by being able to talk more directly to the device. I think this is a nice open form. Let's hope it has a positive effect for non-pc flash development

  by thomas on 2008-05-01 14:21:00

• @Jensa, I realise that it's not just about mobile phones, that's why I said "from the mobile perspective". I totally agree that it's great to open the platform, and it will create a lot of traction for Flash overall. That's really good news for stuff like Gnash, or Red5 etc. I just looked at it from a mobile developer view, and if you work in that space you will know how fragmented it is. Phones are supposed to be all the same - if I write a product for Nintendo DS I know that it's not going to be used in the same way on a Chumby - but for the mobile market you need to know how the player is implemented (ie standards, as Ben mentioned). Life becomes very hard when every manufacturer does things their way. As I say, for other devices like gaming or TV set top boxes, this is great news. For mobile the licensing thing is fantastic (and had to be done because of Silverlight), but the open-ness could be a poisoned chalice.

  by Wolf Luecker on 2008-05-01 15:07:57

• ..all the major handset manufacturers except Apple, that is. I don't actually see how this changes much in terms of whether or not the iPhone will support Flash: the primary reason has always been poor battery performance. It also suits the iPhone better to prefer native WebKit rendering (it can be directly coupled with the native UI, whereas Flash will always be a second class citizen). Even if 'openness' was an issue to Apple, I don't see how the removal of restrictions here is going to change their mind. They still won't control (or even necessarily have any say in) the future direction of the technology, which is somewhat important to a company like Apple (they've shown almost paranoid desire for control on this sort of thing in the past).

  by Ben Darlow on 2008-05-01 11:25:01

• WOW! I had an argument with a friend some weeks ago about this. And I told him that the future of the internet multimedia stays on Flash hands. He said I was wrong because it's not open source. Guess who I sent this news first. :D

  by Andrei Potorac on 2008-05-01 18:58:27

• Mmm, I don't think this is a huge thing for the "big" platforms. It's more of a political move. Where I can see it being important is niche platforms who are reliant on open source SWF players because there isn't an official player available. I'm thinking places like obscure UNIXes, QNX, AROS and so on. It'd also be interesting to see if any of the browser engines gained "native" SWF support... highly unlikely, I know.

  by Olly on 2008-05-02 10:35:56

• Follow up on my previous comment, I am still not convinced. This seems very device centric: # Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player # Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free Notice the term device(s). So the porting APIs only for devices? License fee removal for devices only (because other platform were free anyway, or do they still pay?)? Or is the first point # Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications the one that we should focus on? I know that's a big one. Not trying to spoil the party, just wanting to be clear on what exactly is happening. Stefan

  by Stefan Richter on 2008-05-02 18:45:50

• Lest anyone think that this somehow means that Flash is going Open Source, there is no "source," i.e. Adobe is removing licensing restriction from their spec and publishing API details, but not open sourcing anything.

  by Dietrich Kappe on 2008-05-08 15:40:29

• Hallelujah, awesome news

  by simonconlin on 2008-05-01 10:32:31

• Hallelujah indeed! This is GREAT news!!

  by Ronny on 2008-05-01 10:36:09

• [...] think Aral put it on a much better way. It means Flash everywhere. It means you picked the right platform to develop your skills on. It [...]

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