A few day ago, I reported how to work around a nasty bug in Ubuntu Hardy Heron related to Adobes Flash player.

Adobe today removed some license restrictions on it's flash related specification, which were formerly present to stop developers from creating flash player clones while using Adobes specifications.

The "Open Screen Project" covers in detail:

* Removing licenses from SWF (multimedia and vector-graphics)
* Removing licences from FLV/F4V (video)
* Offering device porting layer APIs for Flash Player
* Publishing specifications for the Flash Cast protocol
* Publishing specifications for the AMF protocol (exchange data with a database)

While it seems like a huge step towards an open source (and hopefully more stable) flash player, the concerning projects (swfdec and Gnash) are quite reserved with their statements.

While part of the Gnash developers still fear legal issues in general and especially patent issues, swfdec head Benjamin Otte states, that for his project "it means pretty much nothing. Swfdec already implements everything that is written down in that specifications".

Back in 2007, Rob Savoye expressed a comprehensible whish:

we'd love to see a public statement that Gnash developers won't be subject to a lawsuit.

I guess that a single statement regarding legal issues with open sourced flashplayers would had more impact for the open source community than the Open Screen Project currently has.

Ed Burnette posted a more detailed report on the background of Adobes decision: "Adobe opens up Flash, but leaves out Google and Apple".