Hey y'all. So here I am at Web 2.0 and I am getting tons of people coming up to me stating some pretty wierd interpretations of our announcement today. For the record, the official announcement is here:
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200611/110706Mozilla.html
Please read this carefully to avoid the top 5 misperceptions:
1. We are donating Flash to open source. This is not true. We contributed source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) to the Mozilla Foundation. AVM is the scripting language engine which interprets Actionscript during runtime. It is a very advanced and well thought out software application but like any other can benefit from new fresh contributions.
2. We have not donated the Flash Player to open source. Note that several /.ers think we are. It is also not true. FP != AVM.
3. We did not purchase Mozilla. One girl told me and several others ina hallway we did. I won't even get into this one....
4. We control the project in Mozilla caled Tamarin. No we don't - in fact giving the code to Mozilla is just the opposite.
5. We are not making flash director open source.
Folks - please read the release carefully....
Thanks
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
3 comments:
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yes, there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding out there around the announcement. If Adobe was open sourcing Flash, wow that would be some seriously interesting news! The AVM stuff announcement is still cool though.
ReplyDeletePurchasing Mozilla? That's a good one.
To tell you the truth, I still don't know what this all means exactly.
ReplyDeleteThere's a difference between "contributed code" vs "contribute THE code...". The way it was worded sounded partial.
The natural conclusion anyone would come up with...would be: is this so a flash plug-in to firefox isn't needed? After all it's the ActionScript Virtual MAchine, not the E4VM (Ecmascript 4 Virtual Machine).
From what I hear it's the ENTIRE AVM source code.
The press release can much more easily be reworded to avoid confusion to just one line:
Adobe giving Mozilla a headstart by giving the AVM source code to power Mozilla's Javascript 2 engine.
"is this so a flash plug-in to firefox isn't needed?"
ReplyDeleteNo, the Adobe Flash Player engine is a media engine as well as a scripting engine. We're just talking about an improved ECMAScript implementation here.
You're correct that Adobe is "contributing code" rather than "contributing THE code" -- not everything in ActionScript is relevant to a browser's need -- this question in the FAQ goes into some of the differences between a complete JavaScript/browser engine and the complete ActionScript/Player engine:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html#JSvsAS
jd/adobe