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Seeing one closed off, 'play by our rules or gtfo' company, whining about another closed off 'play by our rules or gtfo' company is golden.

Flash has some particularly closed bits (client-server communication protocols and Sorenson codecs, IIRC), but in general, it's relatively open. SWF has a published (though arguably incomplete) format.

You could theoretically implement your own version of their runtime, though that's proven difficult, but implementing other tools which target Adobe's runtime is not only allowed, it's been done with MTASC and Ming and a handful of others. And the basic Flex SDK is open source.

Not to mention that Adobe doesn't insert itself between developers and deployment, and they've done plenty to signal that when the HTML 5 revolution arrives, they're happy to target that as well.

All in all, they're doing pretty well on the "openness." And they're almost inarguably doing more to reassure the world they're committed to a growing platforms where developers have options than Apple is.

Sure there are multiple specifications involved, but there's demonstrably open source work, so it can't be _that_ hard:

VLC is an open source media player and can play FLVs.

The Open source media player XBMC has some support for playing RTMP streams.

Not to mention rtmpdump

And Gnash claims to support most SWF v7 and v8 features.

There is also an open-source Action script compiler called MTASC

If we have open source tools to actually generate the bytecode... is it not a reasonable thought that tools could have been developed to actually run that bytecode?

The SWF format has been open for a long time, in one sense: you were always allowed to make your own application that created or modified SWF files, but the licensing agreement said that you were not allowed to create your own application that played them back. So the spec was published, and you could make your own authoring tool, swf compiler, etc. to write swf files (and many people did, for example MTASC) -- but you could not make a swf player tool that competed with Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash Player.

The intent of the new initiative, from what I can tell, is to further open the format so that you can now create your own player. I have seen complaints from Linux users that there is no player available for their specific flavor of Linux -- well, now you can make your own.

Oh, and by the way, those who wish to create Flash content may want to have a look at this site.

> Flash is a proprietary software app that uses
> proprietary protocols that are becoming ubiquitous on the internet.

But it's slowly opening up, and there are some good frameworks out there for it, like ActionStep. ActionStep is good enough to support building a desktop application. And MTASC is a great open source Flash compiler.

http://www.osflash.org/swfmill

also see

http://mtasc.org/ (a better, faster, open-source Actionscript compiler)

and http://haxe.org/ (a better, faster, open-source language for writing flash and other things in)

You can put together an open source development toolkit for Flash development using the MTASC compiler. We use it for ActionStep development and it works great; it cut our compile time dramatically and can easily be used inside TextMate. Great stuff.

And for the language aficionados among you, MTASC itself is written in Ocaml. News for nerds...

There's also a bunch of resources for Open Source Flash, in particular the MTASC open source flash compiler and a new promising language called haxe that can be used for Flash but also AJAX/Javascript and on the Server side. Looks like it will be presented at OSCON 2006, might be interesting to follow.

I'm a serious web developer, and I want it...I just don't want to use Macromedia's tools to build it.

That's why I'm developing ActionStep (check my link). It's an open-source (BSD) implementation of OpenStep (Apple's Cocoa is another implemenation), and is compiled using the open source MTASC compiler. ActionStep is a full out application development library, and some of our contributors have been having amazing success deploying great client apps quickly using Ruby on the backend.

Check it out!

Flash is just a tool. You'll find that anyone building a serious application will not design anything "Flashy" in Flash. These applications are the ones you're most likely to *have* to use (and maybe even want to use?).

The other, effects-laden pages are not important and thus easily ignored.

I know hating Flash is the popular opinion to have right now but developers are working hard to make it better. Open-source frameworks are becoming more popular (including the application framework based on Cocoa to which I contribute, ActionStep) that are compatible with the open-source compiler, MTASC. There is nothing flashy about this Framework, and it has been seen to be faster than Macromedia's framework.

Give Flash a chance. If you're using the right tools, you might find it to be an enjoyable experience that creates a good product.

Sorry for the OT rant.

hey tepples - i know you from gbadev/dsdev

i am personally a flash developer (though not games, we do applications).

If you don't mid doing everything through code, without the nice macromedia gui, there is a free, opensource flash compiler:

http://mtasc.org/

Check osflash.org for some nice tutorials on getting the compiler set up (as well as other useful tools). They show you how to use Eclipse, but personally I'm not a big fan of it.

http://osflash.org/doku.php?id=tutorials

Flash 8 has gone into beta, and will be released in a couple weeks...But with mtasc, you can already compile flash apps that use the new features! (A few new features: realtime effects like blur, shadow, convolve, displacement. Pixel-level control of bitmap data.)

Info on flash 8: http://osflash.org/doku.php?id=flashcoders:undocum ented:flash8

Some random things I have written for flash: http://rorexrobots.com/flash

ActionScript (the language of the flash player) is fully OOP, with classes, inheritance, interfaces, and error throwing/catching. It is similar to java, in that it is compiled into bytecode which is run by the Flash VM. In fact, if you wanted to, you could write code that looks a lot like java.

Yup, I know, the Flash player isn't open source. But there's an open source compiler, MTASC (*), and with ActionStep, there's a rapidly growing (BSD licensed!) open source component library.

All sorts of nifty open source things are happening with Flash these days; you can track that sort of thing on OSFlash.

(*) Written in Ocaml, how cool is that? (**)
(**) Very.

Some folks might be interested to learn of the open-source Flash development trend that is slowly growing. People are starting to use open tools such as Eclipse, Flashout and MTASC to program and compile Flash applications.

what's left is the player, but there are some projects to build one, too.

at this point there is the open source mtasc copiler, which not only is free, but is much faster and can be customizes the macromedia's.

personally, I use another open source editor called sepy which rocks!

now there are quite a few alternatives to authoring flash content away from macromedia.
no need to create a conspiracy where there is none.
and yes, svg cannot do many things the flash player can, go check it.

i love my new workflow. it's so much better than having flash open in another window only to compile my classes.

Well there is already an open source multiplatform ActionScript2 called MTASC compiler available at http://www.mtasc.org . You can this way create Flash content on Linux !

for scripting, you can use eclipse with the AS Development Tool, flashout and MTASC as the compiler. there are commercial products, too.