11 Great Opensource Alternatives for Flash Development

Adobe flash has become a defacto standard for rich content over the internet. Whether is animation, video or cool looking interactive web pages, web developers trun to flash for development.
However, small developers from poorer countries cannot afford expensive licenses for flash. But, they do have excellent opensource alternatives for developing flash content .

Ajax Animator

Ajax Animator is a project to create a fully standards-based, online, collaborative, web-based animation suite.
Its a great Flash IDE alternative and a cross-platform/cross-format animation tool which can be used to create Animated GIFs, SWF (Flash), SVG Animations, and more.

Salasaga

Salasaga is a free, easy to use GUI authoring environment that helps you create visually impressive and actually useful learning material.
Initially similar to Adobe Captivate, but will eventually incorporate an AJAX (browser based) playback capability for advanced content. Flash has at least one serious design limitation (from my POV) making it nearly useless for comprehensive eLearning, and this appears to be addressed by the existing capabilities of AJAX in browsers these days.

OpenLaszlo

OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for the development and delivery of rich Internet applications.

FlashDevelop

FlashDevelop is a free and open source code editor for ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3 & MXML and HaXe.

KToon

KToon is a 2D Animation Toolkit designed by animators for animators, focused to the Cartoon Industry. This project is covered by the GPL License using G++, OpenGL and QT as programming resources from KDevelop as the development platform. By now, KToon is only available for Unix systems

Synfig

Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality 2D animation with fewer people and resources.
It is capable of simulating soft-shading using curved gradients within an area so that the animator doesn t have to draw shading into every single frame. There is also a wide variety of other real-time effects that can be applied to layers or groups of layers like radial blurs, color tweaks that all are

OpenOffice Impress

IMPRESS is a truly outstanding tool for creating effective multimedia presentations. Your presentations will stand out with 2D and 3D clip art, special effects, animation, and high-impact drawing tools.
You can use use IMPRESS built-in ability to create Flash (.swf) versions of your presentations.

AnimationPackage

AnimationPackage is an ActionScript library compatible to Flash Player 6 and above. It helps you to create powerful, maintainable animations and primitive shapes in an efficient and easy way, resulting in small file sizes.

Open Dialect

Open Dialect is an Open Source Flex based Flash IDE. Open Dialect is written in C# using the .NET 2.0 framework and has been ported via Mono and GTK+ to Linux and partially OSX. The purpose of this software is to create Interactive Learning Environments, hence the name (Dynamic Inter-Active Learning Environment Creation Tool). If you are interested in the goals and implications for the field of System Dynamics of Open Dialect continue reading, otherwise enjoy what amounts to (for the time being)

f4l

F4L is an open source development environment for Macromedia Flash, a multi-platform format(swf/svg) widely used for web applications and vector animation. Basically, you can make interactive eye candy for your web site or any other purpose

QFlash – Flash maker

QFlash is a c++ open source IDE to create flash (swf) animation files. It uses ming and qt libraries.