I just read Ryan Stewart’s article where he endorses the idea of open sourcing the Flash player.  Maybe that would explain that odd looking bolt of lightning that I saw arching up from over the horizon from the South and hitting somewhere in the Seattle area. Ryan, I hope you’re okay. Ryan? You still there? :-)

My obvious concern is with the forking issue if the Flash player is open sourced. Ryan pointed out that forking may not necessarily be an issue mainly due to the On2 and MP3 codecs that can’t be released. That got me to thinking about a possible solution that might satisfy everyone. If it’s technically feasible.

1 – Most of the player source code is open.
2 – Along with the MP3 and On2 bits the code that is responsible for the player automatically updating itself is kept locked up.
3 – Anyone who wants to can fork the code all they want. But, they can’t use the SWF extension. They would have to use something else.
4 – If they did fork the code and kept the SWF extension that player would eventually update itself to the Adobe governed version.

In this way there would be a very slight number of people using any forked version of the player to run SWF files. We could publish knowing that only a vanishingly small percentage would ever run our SWF files on a non Adobe player. But, developers would still be able to customize the player to suit specific needs as long as they targeted their player at an extension other than SWF.

I’d love to hear your comments if you think this, or something similar, is technically feasible.

On the other hand maybe ’tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous open source zealots than to take up arms against a sea of forked Flash players.