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Macromedia Looking at Opening Flash Player
duder writes "Well, it appears that Macromedia is going to open source their Flash player. There is a article at benews which contains an purported e-mail from Macromedia's Flash Player Manager. " From what the e-mail says they will be "releasing the Flash Player Source Code SDK & Flash
File Format (SWF) SDK, in mid January."Update: 01/07 02:39 by H :A very big thank you to David Michie who helped bring me up to speed-looks like SWF has been open for quite some time, and Macromedia had announced the opening of the source back in May. Check out OpenSWF.org for more information.
This is clearly an attempt by Macromedia to kill truly free implementations of the Flash format. Should another implementation of the Flash format become the de-facto standard, Macromedia would lose a lot of their strength and control of this market.
I suspect, in particular, that this may be related to the next release of Netscape this year: it will almost certainly need to include some kind of Flash player, and if they didn't make some kind of source code available, it would be the free implementation, giving an alternative implementation of the Flash format an instant big market share.
I think Macromedia's meddling and their implementation are best disregarded. If vector graphics is to become a web standard, we need truly free implementations, not the proprietary "free source" mess that Macromedia is offering.
Does this indicate Macromedia is shedding some enthusiasm for the SVG format? Flash is already the de facto vector graphics standard. I understand and appreciate the fact that the W3C (with reps from Macromedia as members of the working group) is working on a standard for vector graphics, but I don't think it will ever take off, especially if Macromedia does open-source the Flash format.
I understand there are philsophical differences between SVG and Flash, but I just can't find any benefits to using SVG. Flash is small, comes with the browser, and very powerful.
Thanks W3C for all your work, but if this article is true then it will all have been in vain. Maybe the Flash format will change in the future to incorporate the XML DOM so that it will be more in line with what the W3C is shooting for, but who knows?
Ok, Macromedia actually has FAQs on their websites about this. For those that are interested:
Macromedia FAQs
.technomancer
A good place to look for some accurate information would be macromedia's website: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/open/
They state quite clearly that they aren't releasing it as 'open source'. Instead the Flash SDK will be released under a royalty free license. You will not be able to distribute the source with any derived products.
However, the Flash file format IS genuinely Open. So you can write your own Flash player from the ground up.
Flash has several advantages over SVG (http://www.w3c.org/Graphics/SVG/). SVG is XML based, so will not be small. From my understanding, achieving Flash style animation in SVG will involve a lot more work.
However, SVG may have its place. A single renderer should be able to handle SVG and Flash formats, so the standards needn't compete. SVG will be hand craftable, so simple objects (can we say bullet-point spheres and horizontal rules?) won't be difficult to create.
What ever happened to Xara's incredibly tiny Flare vector format?
-- Andrem
There has been a major scientific break-in
Do flash sites have to support different OS'? I was at the "flash site of the day": disney's toy story 2 and after clicking " Yes, I have Flash already -- take me to the Flashed site. " I got an error page saying that I basically had to install windows or get a mac.
this is similar to the fox fiasco of a few weeks ago (although they prevent the viewing of the entire web site) and i'm shure there are plenty of other sites that do the same thing. I guess my question is: is this the result of web site designer's ignorance or does the linux version of flash have some "bugs" which requires the redesigning of the flash site?
does anybody know?
Dan
Well, frankly, the flash player they have out now for Linux isn't really all that bad. I'm not real sure what the limitations are on the thing, but at least now maybe we'll have a fully functional player that's in line with newer players. I know currently that some sites still don't recognize the current Linux flash player including www.shockrave.com. (At least mine doesn't that I d/led from Macromedia) My thing is when are they going to put together a player for Shockwave stuff? The director plugin's need to happen fairly soon along with a GLIBC port of the RealPlayer G2. This libc5 stuff just don't cut it under RH, and I've not been able to find the newest versions/fixes of libc5 lately to upgrade RH's 5.2.18 (or something like that).
.doc, .xls, etc. (If they have, please someone point me in that direction! I could really use them to work on some other projects at the moment!)
Still, it's just one more step towards better software! I just wish M$ would Open up their file formats for
-What have you contributed lately?
Moderator - Too late to kill this story, but maybe someone could amend the article with a link, (if any still around ) that points to the old ancient press releases from Macromedia that clearly stated the intention of releasing source code to flash, flash spec, and a player (besides the flash player source in java they already leaked).
This news/rumor is lame because it is yet ANOTHER example of slashdot making a news announcement out of something generally known to flash oriented people and especially all those programmers that ceased reverse engineering Flash specifically because of the original news release to release source to flash rasterizer interpreter.
Macromedia only went Open source to heed off Public Domain style BSD source code efforts that competitors could use in proprietary products.
Basically its a shameful and transparent move of theirs.
Kind of like 3dfx hiring a guy who got the first glidelib stuff done for voodoo and taking his source and coercing the guy to shut down his 3dfx reverse engineering efforts.
I hate this. I wish theyed hurry up. Its not like flash 3 and 4.0 are that good for animation anyway (frozen frame count, cpu affected, no velocity based animation paths, etc etc)
Hopefully releasing this to Open Source will prompt many more developers, both from a multimedia standpoint, and OS developers, who will port and extend the functionality.
Though based around and on the web, the Flash file format is an incredibly efficient and versatile format - the Flash Player, for those not familiar with it, is the desktop standalone player for Flash files.
To those who think this is simply a marketing ploy, this is simply part of a progression - the Flash file format was Open Sourced about a year ago, to allow exporting in other packages to Flash format, for instance.
Hopefully this will both catalyse the use of Flash as one of the most extensible and versatile multimedia formats available, and act as another "toe in the water" for one of the biggest multimedia companies entering the Linux waters. Let's welcome them aboard.
Fross
This is a rumour. It may be true, but one email some random person supposedly recieved, posted on a website is not enough to be put up as truth. I have not heard of any press releases by Macromedia regarding this, have they been contacted by Slashdot? Its a great thing if it is true, if not this story is a waste of bandwith. Clearly stating it is a rumour would be ok, but presenting it as fact is wrong.