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Filed under: Video, Adobe, Commercial, Open Source

Flash isn't going open source, but it may already be more open than Moonlight

Computer World has published an article asking whether or not Adobe could be gearing up to open-source Flash. That's a question I discussed a while back with Adobe's Dave McAllister, and one that he's continually answered with "the Flash player is as open as I can get it right now."

While most of the inner workings of Flash are already open (The Flex SDK, Blaze DS, and ActionScript virtual machine) there continue to be cries for it to be fully open. Among the stumbling blocks preventing that are the proprietary codecs Adobe licenses (h.264 for video, HE-AAC for audio). "We will continue to open source the technologies that power Flash whenever we have the right to do it," McAllister told me.

Flash is by far the most dominant platform for delivering 80% of all web video and countless browser-based games. Computer World hypothesized that Microsoft's support of the OSS Moonlight project - which has brought Silverlight to Linux - may be putting the heat may be on Adobe to counter quickly.

Adobe sees things differently. Microsoft knows they can't close the gap without help, so getting behind a community effort like Moonlight "Open source can be used as a marketing tool and competitive weapon," McAllister explained. "Silverlight doesn't have the ecosystem that Flash does, so Microsoft is looking at different ways to compete," he continued.

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Filed under: Developer, Internet, News, Web services

Microsoft Silverlight coming to a Linux box near you

The largest hurdle towards widespread adoption of Microsoft's Flash/AIR competitor "Silverlight" may have just gotten a little smaller. Miguel De Icaza, developer of the open source .Net-alike platform Mono and star employee of Novell has recently mentioned on his blog that he and a team of develpoers have been putting in extremely long days to implement Microsoft's new portable platform on Linux.

Dubbed "Moonlight", the project isn't ready for release just yet but Icaza published some excellent screenshots and is currently showing off his new baby to ReMix 2007 conference in France.

The addition of a competitive platform to Flash on Linux could mean we'll see Adobe step up development efforts. The short story -- and our sincere hope -- is, that could mena much shorter waits for equal Flash versions to our Windows pals.

[via The Inquirer]

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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