Hi-

I just started work on an open-source flash decompiler.  It is a Flex/AIR
project to make life easy for everybody in the flash community who might not
know any other languages.  Deals with files that are either online or stored
on your computer.  You can find it at:

http://code.google.com/p/flash-decompiler/

The source code is on subversion & under LGPL.  So feel free to use it for
whatever you want.

Sounds like a mean thing for intellectual property, but is a necessary
evil.  I feel that as great as Adobe is, the lack of decompilers/obfuscators
leads to some bad things:

1) Some people still viewing Flash/Flex/Actionscript/AIR/SWF as corporate
property, rather than a somewhat-open-standard like Java.

2) Some people who are early adopters not being protected.  Those who
created great programs like Picnik & Buzzword might have their source code
available for the world to see & copy.  True, the Buzzword folks wound up
set for life, and Picnik has many partnerships, but the other companies
making Flex apps might wind up left in the cold.

3) Some people assuming SWFs are undecompilable.  This is a dangerous
assumption.  People map out their entire corporate strategy assuming that
their code is unreadable by their competitors.  This is not the truth and by
bringing these things to light, we are doing the Flex/Flash/AIR community a
big favor by letting them know where they stand.

4) People coming up with band-aid solutions such as
swf-over-encrypted-socket which are still praying that the obfuscators are
going to get here before the decompilers do (not going to happen, imho).

There's a big hubbub about AIR 1.0 being released in a month.  Adoption will
ramp up even further at that point.  But unfortunately, all the obfuscator
vendors have been 2 months away from AS3 support for the past 2 years.  So
all the new apps we'll see will be equally readable.

It's time we did something about this.  The sooner we have an open source
AS3 decompiler, the sooner we have an obfuscator.  And that's really what we
need.

Nate Kidwell
http://ludicast.com
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