Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 1st May 2008 12:44 UTC
Just yesterday Mozilla Europe's Tristan Nitot predicted that Adobe might open source Flash one day if competition from Microsoft's Silverlight got too fierce. It seems as if he can look into the future, as today Adobe has announced the Open Screen Project. While not exactly an open source announcement, it does open the door a little bit more.
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Member since:
2006-04-28
I think this really makes sense for Adobe. After all it's in their own interest to make it as easy as possible for people to have a Flash player in any Os or device. They don't earn any money by for example providing a Linux Flash player (in fact it costs them money), but they do it so that it becomes even more a "standard".
So why not open some specs and help develop "runtime environments" (players) for everyone?
What Adobe is really interested in is in selling the IDE to produce this Flash content. And frankly, they won't have any competition there at least for quite some time. It's beyond the FOSS community to produce such an IDE (for the same reasons it can't produce alternatives to AutoCAD, video editors, etc...), and probably beyond any other software company in the short or even medium term.
Having the monopoly of the program to produce the content (which is what produces money), why care about having the monopoly of the program to reproduce such content (which only has costs)?
I wonder if we should be happy about this move... I guess it's good for projects like Gnash and Swfdec, but then I wonder what's the Open Source winning with having these Open Source players that promote content that can't be created with Open Source tools... Or maybe in the long run we could have an Open Source Flash IDE too? Time will tell.