History
FutureWave Software, a small company later acquired by Macromedia, originally defined the file format with one primary objective: to create small files for displaying entertaining animations. The idea was to have a format which could be reused by a player running on any system and which would work with slower network connections.
Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005.
On May 1, 2008, Adobe dropped its licensing restrictions on the SWF format specifications, as part of the Open Screen Project. However, Rob Savoye, a member of the Gnash development team, has pointed to some parts of the Flash format which remain closed. On July 1, 2008, Adobe released code which allowed the Google and Yahoo search-engines to crawl and index SWF files.
Read more about this topic: SWF
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)