I like the Open Screen project and I agree that SWF is a minimally open standard, but to say that Flash is open, enough to code a competitive Flash player, is misleading.
There's enough behavior that a practical Flash player needs to implement that isn't in the Open Screen spec (error handling in particular) that creating your own Flash player for general content on the web produced by Adobe Flash, and not just carefully-vetted SWF's, is hard.
But at least Adobe stopped threatening legal action against anyone who implemented their own Flash player.
There's enough behavior that a practical Flash player needs to implement that isn't in the Open Screen spec (error handling in particular) that creating your own Flash player for general content on the web produced by Adobe Flash, and not just carefully-vetted SWF's, is hard.
But at least Adobe stopped threatening legal action against anyone who implemented their own Flash player.
Edit: Open Page? Open Screen. Oops...