Adobe to Publish Flash File Format Specs
Adobe is today announcing the "Open Screen Project" which will seek to create a consistent runtime environment for rich media across a myriad of devices. In other words, Flash on the web, mobile, desktop, television, and other consumer electronic devices. As part of this initiative, Adobe will be releasing the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv/f4v) and removing all licensing restrictions involved with the Flash format. In the future, the project will be expanded to include AIR.
Previously, Adobe allowed developers to create tools that wrote to the Flash format, but not that played it back -- for that you had to use their Flash player program. Adobe will now remove all licensing fees associated with Flash and AIR -- effective for the next major release of each -- making them free on all devices.
The Open Screen Project "will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices, and set top boxes," said Adobe in a press release.
In addition to publishing the Flash file format specifications, Adobe will also publish specs for the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the Action Message Format protocol. They will also publish the device porting layer APIs for the Flash player.
What Adobe is doing with Flash -- making it an open format -- follows in the footsteps of what they did with PDF back in the mid-90s. Adobe saw a lot of innovation happen around PDF after publishing the file spec and is hoping the same thing will happen with Flash. "Only by making the [Flash file format] spec open and available to everyone will we see the universe of the extended web grow," said Dave McAllister, Director of Standards and Open Source at Adobe, who told me that proprietary communications formats "make no sense."
Since releasing the PDF file format in 1993, it has become an open standard for documents and recently took a major step toward becoming the ISO 32000 Standard. Facing increasing pressure from Microsoft's competing Silverlight technology, it seems Adobe is gunning for Flash to become the standard format for delivering rich media to the web and other devices.
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that's good news. i think adobe is also thinking about the microsoft silverlight technology as big concern for him. anyways it will help web developer to make some very good flash applications.
i am not found of flash or any other sreaming media technology.
Agree with Ajay, this is hint that Adobe want to be ahead of Microsoft Silverlight by spreading its Flash everywhere and cross platform compitable.
They open sourced the live Flash video streaming encoder? Um no, they didn't. Apparently Adobe has it's own interpretations of what "open" means.
http://www.opensource.net/docs/osd
Josh, I think you did fall for Adobe's PR. Flash is not an open format after the launch of the Open Screen Project. It's probably never going to be an open format, because Adobe just uses the right amount of openess to be the nice guys and it's actually sad to see, that even RWW authors can fall for that.
There is a very big difference between making some tools available and a truly open format.
I never used the words "open source" ... I said "open standard" -- which is much the same as PDF. Sorry if what I wrote was misinterpreted, but I never meant to imply that that Adobe was open sourcing Flash -- in fact, Adobe was very clear when I talked to them that this isn't what they're doing.
The terms I used, however, are the accepted ones for what they're doing, as far as I know. (I.e., see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_format ).
It was about time. Open is the only way to go.
Ok, you're right, it's common to use this term, but it's totally misleading, if you'd ask me. Especially for non-techies, consumers, etc. - it implies something that just isn't true.
I'm sorry for getting hard on you, but Adobe gets something under my skin ... ,)
@Igor: I understand where you're coming from, and I totally agree that an open standard isn't as good as open source, at least from a developer point of view. I think I should also point out that I believe to be truly an open standard/format Adobe would need Flash to be certified as such by a third-party body -- such as the ISO. I think that's where they're hoping to go with this, but they're obviously not their yet.
Well, then you are more optimistic then I am. Let's take your own example - PDF. That's never going to be open source and I'm inclined to believe that it's not going to happen with Flash either.
Adobe will be very successful with this move. There is a good chance they will be even more successful then the other big players in the field. Hank Williams is writing in the SAI a very grim version of the future:
"It really is, essentially *the* next generation mobile operating system.
It's not an OS in the traditional sense. That will continue to be some form of Unix, or more generally,Linux. But the Flash platform will become the premier application development target for devices.
This is a direct shot across the bow of both Apple (AAPL) with the iPhone and Google (GOOG) with Android. Adobe has far more 3rd-party developers than Apple does with Mac OS/iPhone or Google does with Android, and if they can make it totally seamless to develop for desktop or mobile, it will radically change the dynamics of the business."
Link: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/adobe_finally_takes_on_apple_google_in_mobile
That's scary. Very, very, very scary. And it's not going to make them open up Flash. On the contrary.
Probably now Steve Jobs would think about getting Flash on iPhone. Somehow could not digest Apple's decision of not bringing flash on iPhone. May be it had to do with royalty fee and not the performance bla bla. Their Quicktime is the worst performing video platform and nowhere close to being a standard in the industry. Good for Adobe and mobile industry.
"Well, then you are more optimistic then I am. Let's take your own example - PDF. That's never going to be open source and I'm inclined to believe that it's not going to happen with Flash either."
This conversation is strange for me... it seems to be arguing over a label, rather than observing what can be done.
PDF is an ISO standard... matter of fact, there's a couple of ISO standards for different profiles of PDF. Governance of the file format has passed to ISO too.
But a file format doesn't have any source code itself, so it's really hard to guess what is intended when that label is the total argument:
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aopen+source
jd/adobe
But how, specifically, will Adobe make more money by giving away what they used to sell?
Or is it merely trying to ruin the business they had before Microsoft Silverlight can come take a piece of it?
Or is it just admitting that one can't charge when later entrants will give something away for free. So, they don't really have a business case for it, but they just don't want to lose the publicity they get by being the company that makes Flash....
I can see they can make some money by selling Flash developer tools, but let's face it, that's peanuts.
"But how, specifically, will Adobe make more money by giving away what they used to sell?"
I think it's like baking a bigger pie, or "a rising tide lifts all boats"... Flash was important five years ago, but is demonstrably more important to the net today. Mobile has advanced to such a stage that the early royalty fees on runtime distribution matters less than making sure any sufficiently-advanced pocket device has core media & logic capabilities.
In 1998 Macromedia published the SWF specification, letting anyone create a direct competitor to Macromedia's authoring tools. Since then, company revenue for authoring tools continued to increase, as did revenues from servers, training, and distribution partnering. Now, with Flash as a publishing platform, we're seeing experimentation in advertising (Adobe Media Player), office applications (Buzzword), communications (Connect & Acrobat), content encryption (Flash Media Rights Management Server), much more. Most of these new areas readily support competitors as well, but the opportunities would not have existed without the wider base of support the formats now enjoy.
... I feel like I didn't explain this well, but the people who do the business analysis don't hang out on weblogs so much. ;-) The way the numbers crunched out, Adobe saw it would be better for its business to give more away. Seems like a good thing, yes...?
jd/adobe