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Comment by ilike | Hacker News Reader

Adobe doesn't restrict the creation of swf players or swf creation tools. Gnash,Swfdec are free open source alternatives to Adobe Flash Player.

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There is some debate about whether the Adobe/Macromedia Flash EULA can be considered binding, but Gnash developers prefer to avoid the issue by not installing Adobe/Macromedia tools, and thereby not accepting the EULA. We can use tools like Ming to generate Flash testcases, and we rely on the efforts of volunteers to run our testcases on commercial software and report the result.

http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/64

Other implementations do exist, but Adobe has taken action to hamper those efforts.

EDIT: Other people can argue for as long as they like about what is considered hampering, but Adobe isn't exactly free and open with flash.

I know i will get downmodded for saying this, but the blog entry is from 2008 and and the faq you linked to speaks only of a debatable possibility of possible restrictions in Adobe's then EULA.

See http://www.openscreenproject.org/about/faq.html to see how much Adobe has opened up since.

Also, it is worth noting that Adobe has never gone after these open source swf player projects.While i agree that Adobe is not as open as it should be, i dont see any reason not to appreciate a good gesture from a powerful company.

> I know i will get downmodded for saying this

I hate when people say this. It's like saying "my point is valid, but people on HN are too stupid to get it".

Or you could look at it as someone saying that they know saying something will cost them karma, but they feel it's important enough to say anyway.

Or you could look on it as someone trying to pretend that's the case. No one knows for sure, maybe not even the poster.

> Adobe has never gone after these open source swf player projects.

They went after rtmpdump, a tool developed by the gnash devs after clean-room reverse engineering to eventually bring RTMP support (client video streaming) to gnash and other free players:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Messaging_Protocol#RT...

> rtmpdump is an open-source command-line tool that is designed to dump the full RTMP stream. It implements the RTMPE protocol, which Adobe believes to be an encryption and copyright protection scheme: however analysis of RTMPE shows that RTMPE is nothing of the kind. rtmpdump was removed from its original SourceForge page due to Adobe issuing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice, which Sourceforge did not have the resources to contest, and could not place any other sourceforge projects at risk. flvstreamer is a fork of rtmpdump which removes all the code that Adobe believed was in violation of the DMCA (due to the belief by Adobe that RTMPE is an encryption mechanism). flvstreamer still allows users to download a stream of audio or video content from all RTMP servers, as long as RTMPE is not enabled on the server. rtmpdump development was restarted in October 2009 and is hosted at the MPlayer site[5]. It has much improved functionality and has been rewritten in C (was C++).

How do you explain this then? http://www.scaleform.com/

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