Open source Flex is great

As I found about the news, I spent some time yesterday having a look at the project's files. It's always interesting to have a look at the internals of the software for curious-like-a-cat people like me... but honestly, I'd rather have the Flash player open sourced. That would help to fix, or at least to explain, those absurd issues one finds from time to time when working with Flash.

Even worse: each new version of Flash player introduces slightly different issues. Or bugs, if you prefer. For example, the latest one (9.0.115) has a funky way of playing sound files. If the sample is 44KHz, everything is fine. But if you had a one minute sample with a different rate (say, 22KHz), you can't simply say go to the second 30 and play, because it will instead go to the second 60 (and hence, finish playing!).

And yes, the issue tracker is now accessible to the general public and so you can directly report these odd behaviours directly to Adobe. See here, here and here for some flash.media.Sound errors already reported.

I'm sure if more people could have a look at the player source, these oddities would be fixed way earlier, or at least they wouldn't be released to the general public with a major bug like that one introduced so lightly.

It would also make easier to have updated versions of the Flash player in platforms which currently are always a step behind, because they need to wait for Adobe to release them, or do not have support at all, like Linux PowerPC (at least, it hadn't, last time I tried).

Unfortunately I have the feeling this won't happen any time soon. With DRM dangerously approaching the path of the player it would be quite surprising to have the source code so that everybody could find work-arounds to those restrictions if they feel like. And it would destroy Adobe's monopoly too, of course. Which I guess they prefer not to happen.