Pixel Bender authoring tools

Question

I have a few questions about the Pixel Bender authoring tools
when Pixel Bender is officially released. I hope someone can answer
these for me or point me towards the answers.
1) Will the Pixel Bender Toolkit be freely available? If not,
will it become a part of Flash CS4, After Effects CS4 and Flex
Builder 3.2?
2) Will the command line compiler be freely available, along
with a language specification?
3) Is the Pixel Bender format open, so that we can expect
third-party development tools? [The answer seems at least partially
yes, since Conduit for Pixel Bender has made its appearance]
To clarify where I'm coming from: I own Photoshop CS4 and
Flex Builder 3 and I'm looking forward to create Photoshop plug-ins
using Pixel Bender. It would make for some nice speed gains,
cross-platform compatibility and a lot less hassle than the PS SDK,
for those plug-ins that don't require the SDK functionality. I have
no need for Flash, so it would be a shame if I had to buy it to
generate Pixel Bender bytecode.
Thanks!
Simon

Answer 1

Kevin, thank you for answering. My major concern was that in
order to write pieces of code for one of the Adobe programs, people
would need to buy another (expensive) program, such as Flash. I'm
happy that's not the case.
As to my point (3), I understand the decision to keep the
run-time Adobe-only (for now) and by 'open' I was indeed referring
mostly to authoring tools.
Thanks again!
Simon
Oh, I'm not sure whether this is the correct place, but let
me sneak in a feature request in relation to Photoshop: it would be
really great if the Pixel Bender plug-ins for Photoshop would get
the option to be supplied with color data in a standard color
space, such as RIMM RGB (used in ACR/Lightroom). That way, the
plug-ins would effectively be color managed, without the hassle of
performing color transformations inside the kernel.