Adobe Launches Two New Open-Source Initiatives

Adobe, one of the biggest software makers in the world, has seen its share of criticism over some of its products and practices, with most of them centered on the ubiquitous Flash platform, the most popular web technology, boasting more than 1 billion installs around the world. While a company this size is bound to get some form of negative attention whatever it does, there are those who would like to see the technology more open. And now it looks like Adobe is finally taking steps in that direction, by releasing two open-source products for the Flash platform.

The two technologies are the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) and Text Layout Framework (TLF). The first is aimed at developers creating feature-rich media players using Flash while the second will bring “sophisticated typography capabilities” to 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. “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. We believe these efforts will strengthen the industry and lead to the next generation of Web applications, content and video experiences.”

OSMF was initially announced as part of the Strobe initiative and it is an open-source standard for developers building custom Flash-based media players, allowing them to use various plugins for ads or other content apart from the usual controls and functionality associated with a player. The framework also comes with a set of APIs and will be released under Mozilla Public License.

TLF is an extensible ActionScript library that can be integrated into apps running in Adobe's Flash Player 10 and Air 1.5. The framework provides some advanced options for dealing with text content like support for complex languages, bidirectional text and multiple columns. TLF is also released under the Mozilla Public License.