Adobe eliminates Flash licensing fees

Adobe announced a new initiative called Open Screen. The software firm aims to spread the reach of Flash on mobile devices by eliminating the licensing fees required to distribute the Flash player and AIR runtime on mobile devices and it will also remove licensing restrictions on the FLV and SWF formats so developers can create full-compatible independent Flash player implementations:

he initiative is supported by a diverse selection of companies in industries ranging from telecommunications to content production, including ARM, Samsung, Nokia, Intel, Cisco, the BBC, and MTV. Adobe hopes to work with these companies to make Flash and AIR the de facto standards for creating and delivering rich media content across computing, entertainment, and communications devices. Eliminating the licensing costs for deploying and integrating Flash playback capabilities in embedded devices will likely appeal to phone handset makers and set-top box manufacturers. Adobe will also be publishing open specifications for its Flash Cast protocol, which will allow third-parties to create custom Flash streaming solutions.

Although the Flash multimedia technology stack was once extremely proprietary and engineered for maximum vendor lock-in, Adobe has gradually been opening various pieces and attempting to build open standards around them in order to encourage the growth of compatible third-party solutions. Adobe released the source code of the Flash player ActionScript virtual machine under an open source license in 2006 and is collaborating with Mozilla to build a standards-based ECMAScript 4 implementation with it that will eventually be used in the Firefox web browser. Last year, Adobe also opened the source of its Flex SDK and its rich web application remoting framework.

More info at ARS Technica.