Technology Lab / Information Technology

Adobe seeks to extend reach of Flash, nukes licensing fees

Adobe has announced the Open Screen project, which will eliminate the …




Although Adobe will not be opening the source code of its own Flash implementation, the company's new Open Screen plans indicate that complete specifications will be available without the traditional restrictions. The specifications were previously only accessible to developers who were willing to sign agreements saying that they would not use the information to implement a Flash player. That licensing model forced open-source Flash implementors to resort to reverse engineering, which doesn't guarantee full compatibility. Adobe's decision to eliminate those licensing restrictions will make it possible for developers working on open source flash projects like Swfdec and Gnash to use Adobe's official specifications.

The Open Screen project will give a big boost to third-party Flash technology and could eventually lead to a significantly better Flash experience on poorly-supported platforms like Linux, where Adobe's official Flash player is obscenely crappy. It also creates the possibility for third parties to bring Flash technology to platforms that were completely unsupported before—most notably, 64-bit operating systems, which have long been neglected by Adobe.

Adobe has been moving slowly in this direction for a few years now, but it's likely that the threat of competition from Microsoft's Silverlight technology was also a relevant factor that contributed to Adobe's decision to open up the Flash formats. Silverlight is largely documented, uses an XML-based format that is supported by open-source authoring tools like Inkscape, and is supported by a mostly-compatible open-source implementation that is under development. Flash could also see some pressure on the distant horizon from emerging standards-based solutions like the HTML5 video tag, which is being implemented in several browsers.

The Open Screen initiative is a win for the open web and the Flash ecosystem. This will empower third-party developers and bring a wider range of choices to content distributors as well as to end users, and it seems likely that the growing amount of competition in the rich web content space will continue to push advancements toward openness that benefit everyone.

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