Adobe open sources Flash platforms

Adobe has announced that it has open sourced two of its Flash player platforms. Adobe's core technologies will remain proprietary.

On Tuesday Adobe launched the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), a rich media player platform. OSMF was previously part of a project codenamed Strobe.

Adobe also open sourced the Text Layout Framework (TLF), a typography platform for Web apps.

"Adobe is committed to providing core Flash platform technologies to the community as open source," said Dave McAllister, director of standards and open source at Adobe, in a statement. "By releasing OSMF and TLF as open source, we are helping facilitate the creation and sharing of best practices for media players and rich text-based Web application development."

Adobe also announced that it was collaborating with content and application delivery company Akamai on the Open Video Player initiative, which was founded by Akamai. The two companies will also collaborate on OSMF.

Adobe Flash is in direct competition with Microsoft's Silverlight rich-media technology. Microsoft launched Silverlight 3 earlier this month.

Silverlight is based on .NET; the open source implementation of .NET is Mono. Microsoft has assisted Mono development. The open source version of Silverlight is called Moonlight, which is based on Mono, and sponsored by Novell. Moonlight enables Silverlight content to run on Linux.

This article was first published as a blog post on ZDNet UK.