Adobe specifically released documentation under the Open Screen Project to counter accusations from Steve Jobs that Flash was a closed platform. The documentati

Adobe specifically released documentation under the Open Screen Project to counter accusations from Steve Jobs that Flash was a closed platform. The documentation we got is full of missing information, but it constitutes explicit permission to write this sort of thing. Even without that permission, reverse engineering and creating work-alike emulators is specifically allowed by several Ninth Circuit precedents. Google v. Oracle also protects us here, too. The reason for this is that software copyright is very weird. Ownership over interfaces is, depending on what circuit court you listen to, either nonexistent or very very very thin. There really isn't an analogue of this for copyright on creative works[0] so it's hard to explain to nontechnical people. You could use our SWF crate to generate SWFs, but the real meat of Flash/Animate's editor is the animation UI, none of which is part of the SWF spec or player. As far as I'm aware nobody ever made a good FOSS replacement for that. If you just want to program games all the AS3 tooling was released as Free Software by Adobe. Ruffle isn't just a browser extension - that's just a convenient way for users to put it on old pages. Our real value prop is being able to put it onto your own website and have your Flash content just be part of the open web, even on iPhones. [0] Which is why the Google/Oracle lawsuit was full of analogies to filing cabinets and Harry Potter chapter titles. I suppose the closest would be tabletop game rules documents, which are explicitly not copyrightable.