
A Letter to Adobe Flash: At Least Consider Open Source - dcawrey
http://www.thechromesource.com/a-letter-to-adobe-flash-at-least-consider-open-source/
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bporterfield
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/>

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...](http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail.html)

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papachito
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.

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wanderr
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.

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jorgecastillo
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>

How do Gnash developers work with the Adobe/Macromedia EULA?
<http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula>

Read this two links and come back to discuss about flash openness.

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keltex
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?

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benologist
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.

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albertzeyer
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.

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benologist
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.

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steveklabnik
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.

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benologist
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.

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poppysan
Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign... all industry-leading software packages.
They cant be too bad...

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benologist
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>

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Qz
More style than content.

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

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olalonde
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.

