Adobe and a number of industry leaders have announced a new initiative called the "Open Screen Project" that completely changes the game for RIA developers, and sets the stage for RIAs on mobile devices. The Open Screen Project removes restrictions on the SWF and FLV specifications - now anyone can create their own player or tools to create SWF content, similar to how PDF is. Adobe is also publishing the device porting layer APIs for Flash Player, so that anyone can create their own Flash Player for platforms that aren't currently supported, especially useful for mobile devices.

Mobile development will also get a boost by the removal of license fees for distributing the Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices. Handset manufacturers will not need to pay Adobe to install the Flash Player on their devices. Adobe hopes that this will result in 1 billion phones having the mobile version of Flash (currently FlashLite) installed on them.

There's a lot of coverage of this online this morning. Slashdot has the story, which always has interesting views from the open source community. CNET, Ryan Stewart and the Washington Post have it from a news angle. TechCrunch has the story as well, with some very supportive comments from readers.

Adobe has announced its intention to open source the Flex framework for Flash applications. The press release is available online, with an FAQ and more on the Adobe Labs website. The story has already been Dugg as well. Robert Scoble has two videos on his site, one with an interview with Ely Greenfield and David Wadhwani, as well as an architecture video and more information on exactly what has been open sourced.

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The Google Code team has a blog post from your's truly outlining the changes that Adobe made in moving our ActionScript libraries from Adobe Labs to Google Code. If you're looking to build a Flash or Flex application that uses APIs from Flickr, YouTube, Mappr, Odeo, or an application that needs to read in RSS or Atom feeds, then you should look at these open source libraries. The eBay library (which was used as the foundation for the San Dimas eBay Apollo project) is also on the site.

The move enables multiple, public contributors to the projects, so if you're interested in helping out you can now. There are also mailing lists available for all the projects, where you can discuss implementation and problems that you're finding.

Kyle Hayes has created a very cool Amazon widget that would look good in the sidebar of any blog. The widget itself was created with Flex, and is delivered to the user as a very small Flash file. The widget reads in a list of ISBN numbers from an XML file, then displays those books in order of their sales ranking on Amazon.com.