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Adobe Founders On Flash and Internet Standards
An anonymous reader points out an 18-month-old interview with the founders of Adobe (and creators of PostScript) Charles Geschke and John Warnock, and highlights three interesting quotes from the book Masterminds of Programming that seem very timely now. "'It is so frustrating that this many years later we're still in an environment where someone says if you really want this to work you have to use Firefox. The whole point of the universality of the Web would be to not have those kind of distinctions, but we're still living with them. It's always fascinating to see how long it takes for certain pieces of historical antiquity to die away. The more you put them in the browsers you've codified them as eternal, and that's stupid. ... With Flash what we're trying to do is both beef it up and make it robust enough so that at least you can get one language that's platform-independent and will move from platform to platform without hitting you every time you turn around with different semantics. ... You can see why, to a certain extent, Apple and Microsoft view that as a challenge because they would like you to buy into their implementation of how the seamless integration with the Web goes. What we're saying is it really shouldn't matter. That cloud ought to be accessible by anybody's computer and through any sort of information sitting out on the Web."
As far as I'm aware, the swf file format is open and documented. Write your own authoring tool if you like - all the info is there. A lot of people seem to miss this fact.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Have a look at the Flex SDK. It's Adobe's open-source tool for creating content to run on the Flash player, and it runs fine for me on Linux. I don't use BSD or Solaris so can't comment on those.
It's a command-line tool and doesn't have the visual bells and whistles of the Flash IDE but is a good way to produce Flash content. Whilst it's primarily aimed at producing application-style code it's more than capable of graphical/game content too, you just need to bring the graphics in from another application.
In the past I had to write a Flash 'video player plus graphical metadata overlay' style application for work. I had a choice of what to write it in, Flash IDE and Flex SDK were both readily available, and I went for Flex because it fitted in with my standard workflow better- I was still using the same text editors, build systems, and version control that I'd use in any language and the GUI library in Flex was a lot nicer than the one Flash was shipping with at the time.
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Interesting!! Last time I checked (which was more than 2 years ago), the format spec didn't allow it to be used to write authoring tools, plus the license was limited to 1 year. If they changed that, then the outlook for new free graphical authoring tools wouldn't be quite as dim.
Isn't the flash file format and programming language an open standard?
It's not really open, nor is it a true standard as it's not been submitted to a recognised standards body. As recently noted on the Gnash developers mailing, Adobe's initial release of a "spec" was incorrect in many areas and incomplete. Then there was the dubious terms it was provided under, most notably that the spec couldn't be used as a reference to write an alternative implementation.
Do you realise that Flash != codec? Do you realise that any video in a Flash applet very likely will be encoded in H.263+, H.264 or VP6? Are you aware that at least two of these require MPEG-LA royalties to decode? Do you realise that Flash does not support Theora? Hence, despite your deep dislike of MPEG-LA, if you're advocating Flash then you are more or less or promoting MPEG-LA royalty bearing technology. The only modern web-video technology which does not require MPEG-LA royalties is HTML5 video with Theora (potentially Googles' VP8 might be added to this list in future).
With all due respect, you appear to have a less than solid grasp of the facts of the matter, which renders your conclusions quite suspect.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.