Great article, this legal grey area has

December 3, 2009 by Dave Haynes

Great article, this legal grey area has been plaguing our industry for years, with no definitive resolution in sight.

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned so far is that Flash 7’s EULA does not include the prohibitive digital signage clause. Therefore, if you can live with the Flash 7 feature set, you can sidestep this legal quagmire completely. Not to mention Flash 7 (AS2) has a simpler reference-counted memory model that make it hard to leak memory whereas flash 9 (AS3) and above are garbage-collected, making it exceedingly easy to leak your objects like a firehose if you don’t know what you are doing. Don’t get me wrong, the creative guys can sure pump out some beautiful stuff, but it really takes a developer to understand how the memory model works and build something truly robust. DS is not the Web, but DS flash content is still produced as if it will be shown once on a web page, not thousands of times a day in a DS player’s loop.

If you want a stable runtime with no legal risk to your business, deploy Flash 7. If you absolutely need the latest snazziness, at least be aware of what you are getting yourself into legally and technically.