Petition to open source Flash and Shockwave spec

github.com

13 points·giancarlostoro··5 comments

The file format spec is available:

https://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf.html

I know it isn't the same as "Open Sourcing" the Flash Player code, but it is how many programs--Camtasia as one example--have/had an "export to Flash" option.

There's still the Shockwave one (Macromedia Shockwave, not "Shockwave" Flash) that's still undocumented by Adobe.

Plenty of the web including HTML and JS own advances can be traced back to some of the amazing things we did with Flash and Shockwave. It would be wonderful if we could build tools to still be able to view archives of Shockwave and Flash with JS. This would only be possible with an open spec.

This is a good lesson: the more we encode our history in proprietary formats, the more we stand to lose.

Indeed, thankfully with projects creating open document formats, Microsoft has added support for such formats to Microsoft Office over the years. Surprised the more open formats have not yet won. I wish Microsoft would just tell the world, okay we're going to work with the open source community to improve these open document formats and make the world a better place. Would be nice to have collections of documents that can just be saved in openly defined formats instead of ".doc" or ".docx" or even a PDF.

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