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What would an open Flash look like?
The Flash platform today has several open source elements, but the part that remains closed is the player implementation. The player is the part of Flash that holds the features; it loads bitmaps and data, rasterizes vectors and text, composites elements on screen and dispatches timers and input events. Things such as the SWF (flash file format), RTMP, FLV/F4V, AMF, and MCD specs and (ActionScript) virtual machine are already open, but without an open-sourced player, these offerings fall flat.
The argument is that given enough open spec, a company or group could build their own player implementation. While this is true, it's questionable that this logic would be workable in the real world. And while this thinking works for HTML, maintaining multiple variants of Flash while keeping compatibility at a maximum, all while following Adobes closed feature lead and developer tool-chain timelines would be excruciating.
Most people will agree that a multi implementation approach is an awful way to take Flash open; HTML continues to suffer because of this. If we have to have an open Flash, the only people who can make this happen are Adobe. A master implementation would allow for fast feature development and compatibility standard that Flash maintains today while allowing the community and vendors to port and contribute to the platform.
If Flash became open and was still a relevant technology, I can picture a day when Flash is no longer a browser plug-in, but something that is actually part of the HTML spec. I could easily see the canvas tag being used as a Flash context, much in the same way canvas is being used to display WebGL and SVG. You could even have plain-text ActionScript sitting in script tags. Now I'm not proposing that we expose the IP of the world, SWF files will always have to be supported. I'm just trying to paint a picture where Flash can be lightweight inside the browser, because if it's not Flash it'll be something else.
Adobe today is the bottleneck of Flash's future. As computer platforms become more varied, needs become different and wider, Flash will fall behind. If Adobe is to hold onto Flash's relevance, they need to let other people in.
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