Adobe Open Screen Project

Unless you have been living under a rock you probably saw the announcement Adobe made this week:

http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/

This is a significant move by Adobe to bring the Adobe® Flash® Player to a much broader audience than ever before. By doing this we are responding to the requests from customers throughout the different industries which want to leverage the Flash platform.

So, yes I haven't been blogging in a while, that has been due to my busy schedule (I'll be more specific soon). But since I've worked on fixing up the FLV and SWF specs a little bit for this project I figured I should add my own personal thoughts.

As the site above mentions this project essentially consists of the following changes:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

All of these are very significant for a lot of customers although individual parties might think that it is one particular item which matters most to them. I assure you that all of them are extremely important.

Bringing a platform like the Adobe Flash Player to devices has its challenges. One of them revolves around documentation. By making the file format and API documentation open, the entry barrier for a lot of developers becomes much lower. In the past it could have been a struggle to get the necessary documentation to the teams which need them. This problem is now gone.

In many circumstances technologies Adobe provided were not compatible with how a particular device or infrastructure was set up. Given the old licensing restrictions it could prove difficult to find technical solutions. By making the specifications open and without restrictions a particular vendor might instead choose a clean rewrite of some parts if they see fit with the result that it integrates better into their eco-system.

Now there have been questions if there are any gotchas in what Adobe has announced concerning the SWF and FLV specifications. There IS in fact a license, it is on page two of the specifications. You might be shocked however by how small it is. It's essentially BSD license style damages disclaimer plus some additional information about trademarks and such. Read it before you use it.

The specifications are available here as PDF files:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/

Does that mean you can implement your own clone which implements what is in these specifications without fear of Adobe coming after you? Yes. Notice that I am careful how I ask this question though. Adobe still holds all the trademarks around this technology, you can not use any of those in your clone or anything related to it. Unless we give the OK to do so obviously.

If you find inaccuracies or missing information in these specifications let us know, we can integrate the feedback right away so they can appear in the next revision of these documents.