[bporterfield]

What almost everyone fails to realize is that Flash is already as open as it possibly can be. The SWF file specification and the player virtual machine are open and completely described here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/

The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses, not Adobe's stubbornness. Adobe pays a lot of money to license codecs that are closed (like h.264) and therefore have to protect those interests within their player. If there were a common open standard for video/audio, this would be a possibility.

(edit) http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail...

[blasdel]

Flash isn't an open standard by any useful definition.

Sure they specified the container format, bytecodes, and data structures — but everybody had figured that part out a long time ago because it's obvious and easy to capitalize on by developing an extractor. The runtime APIs are incredibly hard to reverse-engineer, comprise the vast bulk of the Flash implementation, and are the entire reason for the plugin's instability.

It's like saying that Windows is a completely open platform (save for the patents) just because Microsoft publishes a stable userland ABI and fairly comprehensive API documentation for downstream developers.

Gnash is no further along than ReactOS.

[naner]

There is a huge difference between open specification and open source.

[papachito]

The codec excuse is kind of bogus. Chromium itself comes with a separate package that contain patented codecs. Adobe could easily break down the code into separate parts, the whole open source part and a small codec package containing the patented parts. Of course it should also offer one full package for general use like Google does with Chrome Vs Chromium+ffmpeg-nonfree-codecs.

[wanderr]

Define easily. We have no idea what the Adobe Flash codebase looks like, but given its age and complexity, it's probably pretty hairy. And it was never designed to be open sourced, so there probably weren't any efforts made to keep proprietary and non-proprietary code separate. Going back through and doing the necessary surgery is probably possible but not easy.

[est]

exactly, why not leave H.264/nellymose/whatever module as a stub in the code, then open source the rest. I am pretty sure a third party custom build can come up with using alternative technologies.

But I doubt they are willing to open source their pixel blender in Flash 10 though.

[kierank]

The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses,

Also an embarassingly awful codebase.