The disconnect is wide and boggling

[elfs]

I am boggled.

Most people don't know this, but Adobe Flash is a published specification. Anyone who wants to can implement a Flash interpreter. And while there have been several attempts to do so-- most notably Gnash, the GNU Flash Interpreter-- most of them fall short. Adobe has a lot of good engineers, a lot of money, and has the advantage of seeing the next rev of the standard months before the rest of us.

So it is beyond mind-scroggling to discover that someone has written an open-source implementation of Flash... in Javascript.

Gurk.

Comments

EULA

[ephemient.livejournal.com]

Until recently (just last year), the SWF and FLV File Format Specification License Agreement (http://web.archive.org/*/http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/fileformat/license/) stated

3. Restrictions

a. You may not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders SWF files.

All the Flash re-implementation projects I know of (Gameswf, Swfdec, Gnash, etc.) started off by reverse-engineering the SWF format rather than be tainted by Macromedia/Adobe's (at the time, also incomplete) documentation.