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Adobe To Open Real-Time Messaging Protocol
synodinos writes "Adobe has
announced plans
to publish the Real-Time Messaging Protocol specification, which is
designed for high-performance transmission of audio, video, and data between
Adobe Flash Platform technologies. This move that has followed the opening of
the AMF spec has been
received with varying degrees of enthusiasm from the RIA community."
Which proves two things:
GP doesn't know WTF they're talking about... ...but they're right. PDF is an open standard, implemented by other vendors in a way that sucks, yet Acrobat still sucks.
In fact, Adobe has never really been known for performance. For another fun test, take a Flash video, download the FLV, and play it in any other player. Compare CPU usage.
Last I tried this, in Flash, it was over 50% of a core. In VLC, or mplayer, or pretty much anything else -- despite the fact that this is FLV, which is presumably designed for Flash -- and it's less than 1%.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Not really.
First, it's got the same problem as any other proprietary application which opens specs -- there's only one implementation, and that implementation is proprietary. Most specs at least include a reference implementation.
More importantly, how long have the specs been open? Last I checked, they were only open for developing anything but a client/viewer.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Search on google for: gnash clean room
What you will find is that Adobe made it difficult to legally work on an open source viewer, and that the specs that exist are either (1) leaked, and therefore it is questionable whether you can legally use them, or (2) from a clean room reverse engineering.
From: http://lwn.net/Articles/270056/
Gnash development has been done using a Clean room reverse engineering technique. By agreeing to the license for the Adobe (formerly Shockwave) Flash player, a developer gives up the right to develop a competing product.
From: http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/30
Rob: The Adobe EULA for Flash forbids anyone who has installed their Flash tools or plugin from working on Flash technologies. This has had a chilling effect on the development of free Flash players, since a developer must either choose to decide that Adobe won't sue them over this, or to do what Gnash does, which is a slow and inefficient, clean room, reverse engineering project.
Adobe has declined to comment on this issue, since the confusion benefits their lockin of the market. Although Adobe has said they support Open Source projects, and donated Tamarin to Mozilla, we'd love to see a public statement that Gnash developers won't be subject to a lawsuit. It's very difficult to find developers that have never installed the Adobe software ever, which is what we've been doing to maintain our clean room approach.
From: http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/21
Savoye suggests that, "Most of this documentation, if we really wanted it, has already leaked out on the Internet years ago."