Flash and Open Source

Anders Schneiderman asks: "I'm involved in a project that's planning to create open source toys for educating people around complicated policy questions (e.g., policy on prescription drugs). We'd really like to use Flash as our main language, but we're concerned about the fact that the major Flash development tools cost $500--more than some of the community group folks we want to involve can afford. I took a look at Sourceforge, and while there are plenty of projects that offer ways to create Flash for free, there didn't seem to be any v.1 general development tools. Did I miss something? If you want to build Flash and you don't want to pay $500, how do you do it (aside from copying somebody else's, which as Bill Gates told us is just bad, bad, bad)? And if there aren't any powerful open source tools for it, any thoughts on why?"

Comments

where are the comments?

[dmarien]

I'm rather curious seeing as how i work in a MS flash desing firm.

flash is FREE in indo

[p13zo]

i live in indonesia, this is the land of software piracy. you could buy flash,dreamweaver,fireworks etc for just 10000 rupiahs (a lousy 1 american dollar) but theres no one selling pirated linux distro here.(who`d want to buy them anyway, when i could download them for free) ;p i`ve never realized that the software im using cost $500 (5 million rupiah) jeezzfuk!!!! my other machine runs a winXP (installed from `microsoft combo` CD - with wind95,98,XPpro,office,project in one cd). i wonder how much does it realy cost... come to indo guys!!! its heaven here yay..