“How truly open is Flash? Do we need "Open Flash”

The article I read online was called “How truly open is Flash? Do we need "Open Flash”?” written on Wednesday, January 03, 2007, and posted by D. Nickull. It made some interesting points, about whether or not Flash is a proprietary technology.

Some of the basic points he made were the following:

“ 1. The Flash programming language (ActionScript) is 100% ECMASCript, a standard with multiple implementations and is open. You can script using ActionScript with a plain old text editor. Which what means that it makes it easier for anyone from an old user to a new user to use. They have made it easier and more versatile for more users to use.
“ 2. The internal Flash Player VM, “Tamarin” is an open source project run by the Mozilla foundation (donated by Adobe). It also helps people who use Flash for internet gaming or advertisements. It puts flash projects on the net faster.
3. The Flash file format, *.SWF is a published format.
4. The Adobe Flash Player (the reference implementation) is free. So are several others like the Gnash player.
5. The Flash Player is available on Mac, Windows, Linux, Playstation, Nintendo Wii, Symbion, and many other platforms.
6. An SDK for building, compiling, debugging Flash applications is available for free on Mac, Windows and Linux
7. There are over 100 third party, free, commercial, open source and closed source products that produce, edit, generate, and otherwise manipulate Flash files, Flash Video files, etc.
8. There is a very active Open Source community around the Flash runtime. For better or worse (I do work for Adobe -;) many people take full advantage of the Flash Player without using any commercial products from Adobe (or anyone belse). See http://www.osflash.org/ to get a good view of this.
9. Flash itself makes use of several standards such as JPG, AVI, GIF and PNG's as outlined here.”

After reading the article, I feel that the author did a good job at addressing all the issues at hand in a fair and even manner, as well as all the points to be had.
While I can’t pretend to understand all of everything it talks about, I gather that this is a new debate, with people still weighing all the options. I myself am still in the process of learning Flash, so some of the above is vague to me. However, I still have faith in Flash and its abilities to create what I need.