OK. I might be missing the point about the whole Flash thing but as far as I'm aware the SWF format is an open format just like e.g. HTML. Does this mean that y

OK. I might be missing the point about the whole Flash thing but as far as I'm aware the SWF format is an open format just like e.g. HTML. Does this mean that your browser that displays the HTML needs to be open source for it to be considered a standard? IE isn't open source. Is that an issue? OK, IE is crap as displaying HTML but I guess that's another issue. Sure the SWF format is currently controlled by Adobe and I'm not sure what the current status is on implementing your own Flash Player, but there are already alternatives like Gnash[1]. Adobe already has donated their Tamarin[2] AVM2 to the Mozilla foundation. There is definitely work in progress when it comes to open source at Adobe. Then there is the Open Screen Project[3] that basically tries to standardise Flash. I mean, 99% or so of all web user has Flash installed. That looks pretty standard to me. [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ [2] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/ http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/ [3] http://www.openscreenproject.org/ http://www.openscreenproject.org/