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Macromedia Looking at Opening Flash Player

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the open-the-source dept.

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.

3 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Moderator - Too late to kill this story, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4

    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)

  2. A worthy adversary to Quicktime! by Fross · · Score: 4

    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

  3. Arrgh by BoneFlower · · Score: 4

    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.