Open Screen is a trojan horse to make Flash the standard development API for TV sets (leaving everyone dependent on Adobe's professional tools to create the content for these devices).

SWF and F4V container formats are indeed published freely, however the Flash runtime itself is still proprietary, and thus incompatible with an open web.

There's lots of non-Adobe tools for developing in Flash.

I use http://fdt.powerflasher.com/ now and before that http://flashdevelop.org/

Good luck competing with a company that controls the underlying frameworks you're building your development environment for. There will never be a truly viable alternative to Flash Builder from Adobe as long as they control the runtime. Depending on third party IDEs for a proprietary API is shaky ground to build a business on.

Have you used the IDEs he mentioned? They are both quite good and definitely viable alternatives to Adobe's products.

Disagree. FDT is in fact a much better solution than Flash CS and Flex Builder.

I have not, but my concern would be becoming dependent on a third party Flash development tool for my workflow, and then being left behind as Adobe adds new features to the runtime unsupported by the IDE I'm using, or worse, that they find a way to break content created with the competing IDE. I don't think such a possibility would be all that unexpected, given Adobe's competitive nature and refusal to cede control of the runtime.

The Flex SDK which the 3rd party IDEs and Adobe's own Flash Builder* IDE use is actually open source too.

* formerly Flex Builder, renamed to avoid confusion with the SDK

I like the Open Screen project and I agree that SWF is a minimally open standard, but to say that Flash is open, enough to code a competitive Flash player, is misleading.

There's enough behavior that a practical Flash player needs to implement that isn't in the Open Screen spec (error handling in particular) that creating your own Flash player for general content on the web produced by Adobe Flash, and not just carefully-vetted SWF's, is hard.

But at least Adobe stopped threatening legal action against anyone who implemented their own Flash player.

Edit: Open Page? Open Screen. Oops...