Thank you Adobe

Adobe has given away the ActionScript 3 runtime to Mozilla, to be made into the reference implementation of ECMAScript 4 (JavaScript 2):

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) and the Mozilla Foundation, a public-benefit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet, today announced that Adobe has contributed source code for the ActionScript™ Virtual Machine, the powerful standards-based scripting language engine in Adobe® Flash® Player, to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, to accelerate the development of this standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications.

Read the whole press release, or perhaps a more developer friendly explanation from Kaourantin’s blog.

While this doen’t mean they have given away ActionScript 3, since the API:s and the compiler are not included, it does mean that Flash, Flex and Ajax applications will be able to share a code base in the future. That is, if Internet Explorer will ever support JavaScript 2.