Adobe and Nokia Provide $10 Million Fund for Mobile Flash Development
Under the auspices of the Open Screen Project, mobile vendor Nokia and software maker Adobe are providing a $10 million fund to help developers create mobile Flash applications. The underlying software will become free at least to some extent, according to Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch.
The Open Screen Project Fund will be available to developers of applications for mobile, desktop and consumer electronics devices using the Adobe Flash platform. Nokia and Adobe announced their joint funding at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The companies are members of the Open Screen Project, which gave them the opportunity to put the fund under the project's auspices.
Developers should submit their ideas for applications using Flash, as conceived for, and marketed on, Nokia's mobile devices. Although not exactly clear on licensing provisions, the project promises that developers will retain all rights to their applications. Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch re-emphasizes the openness suggested by the name of the project in a short video presentation: "Some of the things that Adobe is doing to contribute to this mission are big changes on how we make the client technology available... making the technology free for inclusion on devices... with no royalty." He tries to make the open software issue a bit more concrete by saying that "the Flash file format called SWF is something that we've been publishing since 1998...[for which] we're now removing the license restriction, so that you can now use the SWF format in any way you wish." The website already publishes the open specifications for SWF, FLV/F4V, AMF, RTMP and the Mobile Content Delivery Protocol. The porting APIs and reference implementations will also become available, albeit only to participants in the Open Screen Project.
Founded mainly by Adobe in May 2008, the project has more than 20 member companies, including among the others Intel, Motorola and LG Electronics. Their mission, according to Adobe platform business unit VP David Wadhwani, is "an industry movement in which key players come together to provide a consistent runtime environment" for platform-independent Internet applications. Lynch adds a further mission of the cooperating partners to make applications more easily updatable, "like they are in the PC world." He continues, "We've actually organized our engineering teams to combine the mobile and PC efforts into unified teams, so the same teams working on Flash Players will be targeting PCs and Smartphones."
The Open Screen Project Fund site includes a "Get started" page as a call to all developers. Especially sought are applications in the focus areas of entertainment, business and social networking, among others. The submitted software should work across multiple devices and "leverage Adobe Flash Lite software, the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR runtimes, and the Nokia platform."
Issue 259/2022
Buy this issue as a PDF
News
-
System76 Teams up with HP to Create the Dev One Laptop
HP and System76 have come together to develop a new laptop, powered by Pop!_OS and aimed toward developers.
-
Titan Linux is a New KDE Linux Based on Debian Stable
Titan Linux is a new Debian-based Linux distribution that features the KDE Plasma desktop with a focus on usability and performance.
-
Danielle Foré Has an Update for elementary OS 7
Now that Ubuntu 22.04 has been released, the team behind elementary OS is preparing for the upcoming 7.0 release.
-
Linux New Media Launches Open Source JobHub
New job website focuses on connecting technical and non-technical professionals with organizations in open source.
-
Ubuntu Cinnamon 22.04 Now Available
Ubuntu Cinnamon 22.04 has been released with all the additions from upstream as well as other features and improvements.
-
Pop!_OS 22.04 Has Officially Been Released
From the makers of some of the finest Linux-powered desktop and laptop computers on the market comes the latest version of their Ubuntu-based distribution, Pop!_OS 22.04.
-
Star Labs Unveils a New Small Format Linux PC
The Byte Mk I is an AMD-powered mini Linux PC with Coreboot support and plenty of power.
-
MX Linux Verison 21.1 “Wildflower” Now Available
The latest release of the systemd-less MX Linux is now ready for public consumption.
-
Microsoft Expands Their Windows Subsystem for Linux Offerings With AlmaLinux
Anyone who works with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) will now find a new addition to the available distributions, one that’s become the front-runner replacement for CentOS.
-
Debian 11.3 Released wIth Numerous Bug and Security Fixes
The latest point release for Debian Bullseye is now available with some very important updates.