6 ms·

A Letter to Adobe Flash: At Least Consider Open Source

19 points by dcawrey 17y ago

Qz 17y ago
More style than content.
albertzeyer 17y ago
In principle a good idea (or just a logic step). It's kind of stupid that they haven't done that a long time ago already. It would have solved any performance, arch support, security or whatever problems and also the whole debate about openness. It would have changed the view on Adobe/Flash a lot for many people. Although, if it happens now, I'm not really sure what Flash can offer over HTML5. They are both almost equal in features (with different concentrations though). Maybe Flash is still a bit more advanced in development about multimedia, so it maybe would have some improvements to implement something in Flash (if it is open) but I really cannot think of anything which would be interesting for me personally which cannot be done in a good/better way in HTML5.
- benologist 17y ago
  Flash/Silverlight/etc are very agile, it's May now and there's still plenty of time for any of them to roll out significant new features this year while browser vendors and the W3 debate which video format to use and consumers click ignore on the update your browser screen for the 1000th time.
  - steveklabnik 17y ago
    There is plenty of time for them to improve this year. But since it's taken 3 years to get into beta, I'm not very confident that rapid improvement will be happening.
    - benologist 17y ago
      Right, but that's cause Adobe sucks at building software. But they do have the ability to deploy updates that actually reach consumers in a timely fashion, massively faster than any W3 spec or browser vendor can even dream of pushing something through. Everything Adobe, Microsoft, Unity etc push to their own platforms between HTML5 and HTML6 is stuff that HTML5 doesn't have and can't include until the next release beyond fragmented and browser-specific implementations.
      - steveklabnik 17y ago
        But the ability to do so still doesn't matter unless the code gets improved in the first place... As an aside, there won't be an "HTML6." HTML will become versionless from here on out.
      - poppysan 17y ago
        Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign... all industry-leading software packages. They cant be too bad...
        benologist 17y ago
        Industry leading is not the same as perfect. They get a lot of stuff right, they make some fantastic innovations, I love AS3 and make most of my income from building games in Flash. But if you use Adobe software you'll nod your head at a lot of stuff here: http://dearadobe.com/top_rated.php http://dearadobe.com/top_rated.php
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
      - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
        Your mixing things up here. Adobe Flash can push upgrades to everyone because they have 98% penetration and a built in update system. New versions are ubiquitous within a year. Silverlight and Unity can only push updates to people who have them installed. This means they basically face the same issue as browsers who can put things into the hands of their users (1/3 of users for Mozilla, 1/2 if all the browsers but IE support it).
  - albertzeyer 17y ago
    Just curious: What significant features could that be?
    - benologist 17y ago
      It doesn't really matter what it is, Adobe can get x to consumers years ahead of the W3 and browser vendors.
acg 17y ago
There is a link to a petition in the comments, although few signatures. http://www.openplayer.net/ http://www.openplayer.net/
keltex 17y ago
It's the logical thing for Adobe to do. Jobs is complaining about the proprietary platform, performance issues and all that. Now it time to turn it around. Adobe will still sell all their tools, they'll still have legions of flash programmers, they'll run on every mobile device except the iPhone. What's so important about keeping the flash engine closed source?
- benologist 17y ago
  I agree completely and they're halfway there so it makes plenty of sense to take the last step - there are already open source and commercial alternative IDEs like FlashDevelop and FDT. Open sourcing the flashplayer will rapidly make them a standard on every platform instead of being a defacto standard on Windows and generally poor results outside of it. Open sourcing the FLA format can only help developers ... every new version of Flash devs everywhere pray that this time Adobe'll do nothing more than just fix everything and the threat of someone else doing that for us that might be the motivation Adobe needs to do it themselves.
- mcgyver 17y ago
  Open sourcing Flash would definitely be in Adobe's best interests. The only possible thing holding them back is shoddy coding practices (using security-through-obscurity) which would result in more exploits and the Flash player gaining an even worse reputation.
bporterfield 17y ago
What almost everyone fails to realize is that Flash is already as open as it possibly can be. The SWF file specification and the player virtual machine are open and completely described here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/ http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/ The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses, not Adobe's stubbornness. Adobe pays a lot of money to license codecs that are closed (like h.264) and therefore have to protect those interests within their player. If there were a common open standard for video/audio, this would be a possibility. (edit) http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail.html http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail...
- kierank 17y ago
  The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses, Also an embarassingly awful codebase.
- papachito 17y ago
  The codec excuse is kind of bogus. Chromium itself comes with a separate package that contain patented codecs. Adobe could easily break down the code into separate parts, the whole open source part and a small codec package containing the patented parts. Of course it should also offer one full package for general use like Google does with Chrome Vs Chromium+ffmpeg-nonfree-codecs.
  - est 17y ago
    exactly, why not leave H.264/nellymose/whatever module as a stub in the code, then open source the rest. I am pretty sure a third party custom build can come up with using alternative technologies. But I doubt they are willing to open source their pixel blender in Flash 10 though.
  - wanderr 17y ago
    Define easily. We have no idea what the Adobe Flash codebase looks like, but given its age and complexity, it's probably pretty hairy. And it was never designed to be open sourced, so there probably weren't any efforts made to keep proprietary and non-proprietary code separate. Going back through and doing the necessary surgery is probably possible but not easy.
olalonde 17y ago
I would like to see Adobe contribute to the HTML5 specs and "merge" the good features of Flash with HTML5. I don't think it makes sense anymore to have both HTML5 and Flash as two separate entities as they basically aim to solve the same problem. Adobe could then build great authoring tools for web apps just like it did for Flash... if only they could see the opportunity.
jorgecastillo 17y ago
I am getting tired of repeating myself but... Adobe Uses DMCA On Protocol It Promised To Open http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/22/1254246 http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/22/1254246 How do Gnash developers work with the Adobe/Macromedia EULA? http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula Read this two links and come back to discuss about flash openness.

19 points by dcawrey 17y ago

Qz 17y ago

More style than content.

In principle a good idea (or just a logic step). It's kind of stupid that they haven't done that a long time ago already. It would have solved any performance, arch support, security or whatever problems and also the whole debate about openness. It would have changed the view on Adobe/Flash a lot for many people. Although, if it happens now, I'm not really sure what Flash can offer over HTML5. They are both almost equal in features (with different concentrations though). Maybe Flash is still a bit more advanced in development about multimedia, so it maybe would have some improvements to implement something in Flash (if it is open) but I really cannot think of anything which would be interesting for me personally which cannot be done in a good/better way in HTML5.

benologist 17y ago
Flash/Silverlight/etc are very agile, it's May now and there's still plenty of time for any of them to roll out significant new features this year while browser vendors and the W3 debate which video format to use and consumers click ignore on the update your browser screen for the 1000th time.
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  There is plenty of time for them to improve this year. But since it's taken 3 years to get into beta, I'm not very confident that rapid improvement will be happening.
  - benologist 17y ago
    Right, but that's cause Adobe sucks at building software. But they do have the ability to deploy updates that actually reach consumers in a timely fashion, massively faster than any W3 spec or browser vendor can even dream of pushing something through. Everything Adobe, Microsoft, Unity etc push to their own platforms between HTML5 and HTML6 is stuff that HTML5 doesn't have and can't include until the next release beyond fragmented and browser-specific implementations.
    - steveklabnik 17y ago
      But the ability to do so still doesn't matter unless the code gets improved in the first place... As an aside, there won't be an "HTML6." HTML will become versionless from here on out.
    - poppysan 17y ago
      Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign... all industry-leading software packages. They cant be too bad...
      - benologist 17y ago
        Industry leading is not the same as perfect. They get a lot of stuff right, they make some fantastic innovations, I love AS3 and make most of my income from building games in Flash. But if you use Adobe software you'll nod your head at a lot of stuff here: http://dearadobe.com/top_rated.php http://dearadobe.com/top_rated.php
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
      Your mixing things up here. Adobe Flash can push upgrades to everyone because they have 98% penetration and a built in update system. New versions are ubiquitous within a year. Silverlight and Unity can only push updates to people who have them installed. This means they basically face the same issue as browsers who can put things into the hands of their users (1/3 of users for Mozilla, 1/2 if all the browsers but IE support it).
- albertzeyer 17y ago
  Just curious: What significant features could that be?
  - benologist 17y ago
    It doesn't really matter what it is, Adobe can get x to consumers years ahead of the W3 and browser vendors.

acg 17y ago

There is a link to a petition in the comments, although few signatures. http://www.openplayer.net/ http://www.openplayer.net/

keltex 17y ago

It's the logical thing for Adobe to do. Jobs is complaining about the proprietary platform, performance issues and all that. Now it time to turn it around. Adobe will still sell all their tools, they'll still have legions of flash programmers, they'll run on every mobile device except the iPhone. What's so important about keeping the flash engine closed source?

benologist 17y ago
I agree completely and they're halfway there so it makes plenty of sense to take the last step - there are already open source and commercial alternative IDEs like FlashDevelop and FDT. Open sourcing the flashplayer will rapidly make them a standard on every platform instead of being a defacto standard on Windows and generally poor results outside of it. Open sourcing the FLA format can only help developers ... every new version of Flash devs everywhere pray that this time Adobe'll do nothing more than just fix everything and the threat of someone else doing that for us that might be the motivation Adobe needs to do it themselves.
mcgyver 17y ago
Open sourcing Flash would definitely be in Adobe's best interests. The only possible thing holding them back is shoddy coding practices (using security-through-obscurity) which would result in more exploits and the Flash player gaining an even worse reputation.

bporterfield 17y ago

What almost everyone fails to realize is that Flash is already as open as it possibly can be. The SWF file specification and the player virtual machine are open and completely described here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/ http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/ The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses, not Adobe's stubbornness. Adobe pays a lot of money to license codecs that are closed (like h.264) and therefore have to protect those interests within their player. If there were a common open standard for video/audio, this would be a possibility. (edit) http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail.html http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail...

kierank 17y ago
The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses, Also an embarassingly awful codebase.
papachito 17y ago
The codec excuse is kind of bogus. Chromium itself comes with a separate package that contain patented codecs. Adobe could easily break down the code into separate parts, the whole open source part and a small codec package containing the patented parts. Of course it should also offer one full package for general use like Google does with Chrome Vs Chromium+ffmpeg-nonfree-codecs.
- est 17y ago
  exactly, why not leave H.264/nellymose/whatever module as a stub in the code, then open source the rest. I am pretty sure a third party custom build can come up with using alternative technologies. But I doubt they are willing to open source their pixel blender in Flash 10 though.
- wanderr 17y ago
  Define easily. We have no idea what the Adobe Flash codebase looks like, but given its age and complexity, it's probably pretty hairy. And it was never designed to be open sourced, so there probably weren't any efforts made to keep proprietary and non-proprietary code separate. Going back through and doing the necessary surgery is probably possible but not easy.

olalonde 17y ago

I would like to see Adobe contribute to the HTML5 specs and "merge" the good features of Flash with HTML5. I don't think it makes sense anymore to have both HTML5 and Flash as two separate entities as they basically aim to solve the same problem. Adobe could then build great authoring tools for web apps just like it did for Flash... if only they could see the opportunity.

jorgecastillo 17y ago

I am getting tired of repeating myself but... Adobe Uses DMCA On Protocol It Promised To Open http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/22/1254246 http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/22/1254246 How do Gnash developers work with the Adobe/Macromedia EULA? http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula Read this two links and come back to discuss about flash openness.