Posted by SpaceGirl on 07/31/07 14:03

Toby A Inkster wrote:
> Travis Newbury wrote:
>
>> Do you want the player to be open source? Adobe (and Macromedia
>> before them) have always given out the specs for creating SWF files.
>
> The SWF specs have been published, but:
>
> 1. You need to agree to a fairly restrictive licence,
> promising not to use them to build a competing
> player; and
>
> 2. FLV is not included in the published specs.

FLV can't be, as Adobe have to license the codecs it uses. They can't
give that away for free.

> The Flash Player is only available for Windows 98 and above, Mac OS X
> and x86 versions of Linux, and because of the restrictions on the spec
> licence, third parties can't use it to produce players for other
> platforms -- they need to reverse engineer the format instead, making
> it effectively no better than a closed, proprietary format.

At the same time this is a good thing. It has kept the player extremely
small and fast. OpenSource isn't all good! :)


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