RJ blogged a bit earlier, but I thought I'd share a couple of my thoughts too. I guess we all knew this would come eventually, Flash is more open thanks to the Open Sceen Project.Here's the skinny on the what new licensing entails:

- Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
- Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
- Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
- Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

The biggest implication of this is that it's now possible, and likely already underway, to port the Flash Player to other devices such as phones and other personal electronics. What was your second reaction to the iPhone? Mine was "does it run Flash?" and I don't think I was alone. Actually could we get in on the Blackberry first...maybe some of my fellow Canadians are already on it. Let's hope so:)

For large organizations and governments just the possibility of creating an alternative runtime is big enough benefit to make this announcement noteworthy.

Let's keep in mind that even though the spec is open and free that doesn't mean it's small job to recreate the Flash Player, after all some of the brightest minds in the industry have been working on it for over 10yrs. Most attempts to recreate it will be slower, bigger and buggier...especially in the early days. The flip side is that the bright mind of the Flash community can now look through the spec and provide feedback to Adobe.

One thing to note as Dion points out is that the license hasn't been published yet, so let's hope there's no surprises in there.

Unfortunately, when I looked into the details, there wasn’t much to see. The claim was that the FLV/SWF/F4V binary formats will be Open, and there will no longer be the restriction that said you can’t RUN the code.

The problem was that there was no license to go along with this claim, which means that we can’t actually do much with it yet. Adobe isn’t more “Open” today than it was the day before the announcement. This will hopefully change very soon when we actually see the license, and hopefully see even more.

I know there a lot of critics out there saying this isn't good enough, but it's a step in the right direction. I'm sure the license details will be forthcoming.

Like giving the PDF spec to ISO, Tamarin to Mozilla and open sourcing Flex Adobe is making great strides at becoming more open. It's great to have momentum in this direction from one of leaders in the RIA space. It's going to be a while before the impact of this is felt, building new runtimes and getting them distributed just takes time. It's going to happen though.