[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.