Adobe Donates Flash to Open Source Community

November 8th, 2006: Adobe will be working with the Mozilla Foundation to open source its flash player scripting engine, creating a new open standard for interactive Web applications.

Adobe has contributed source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine, a standards-based scripting language engine in Adobe Flash Player, to the Foundation. From here, Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, which will attempt to accelerate the development of a standards-based approach for creating Web applications.

The two say that the Tamarin project will incorperate the ECMAScript Edition 4 standard language, which Mozilla uses for SpiderMonkey, Firefox’s core javascript engine.

“Adobe’s work on the new virtual machine is the largest contribution to the Mozilla Foundation since its inception,” said Brendan Eich, chief technology officer, Mozilla Corporation, and creator of JavaScript. “Now web developers have a high-performance, open source virtual machine for building and deploying interactive applications across both Adobe Flash Player and the Firefox web browser.”

“This is a major milestone in bringing together the broader HTML and Flash development communities around a common language, and empowering the creation of even more innovative applications in the Web 2.0 world,” said Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe. “By working with the open source community we are accelerating the adoption of a standard language for creating and delivering richer, more interactive experiences that work consistently across PCs and mobile devices.”

Adobe Flash Player is installed on over 700 million PCs and mobile devices worldwide.

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