
What if Flash Were an Open Standard? - sant0sk1
http://daringfireball.net/2010/02/winer_flash_open_standards
======
stonemetal
That article gives Apple way to much credit. KHTML is LGPL licensed They had
to release source. Blocks in GCC had to release source. The only thing he gets
right is that Apple contributes to BSD licensed LLVM, but then he calls it
Apple's technology. The project was around a long time before Apple showed up
to contribute.

So on the whole I'd say Apple doesn't care if its technology is open or not as
long as they are in control. Note the KHTML guys have said that Apple has
dorked up the source so much that they basically can't use anything Apple has
done, pretty much the same for GCC. LLVM is the only project where they seem
to be playing nice and I don't see that lasting past the point where Apple
starts using it heavily.

~~~
wtallis
Apple doesn't care whether the technology is open, so long as nobody else has
sole control.

Supporting open web standards is the only way Apple can provide a decent web
experience without constantly playing catch-up to whatever Microsoft
implements in IE.

Creating OpenCL as an open standard was the only way they could provide GPU
computing that wasn't totally controlled by NVidia, but would still get
support from GPU vendors. Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't have the resources
to maintain their own proprietary GPU computing language.

Killing Flash is the only way Apple can give their users access to dynamic web
content with good performance, because Adobe clearly doesn't have the
motivation to do it for them.

libdispatch is Apple's way of trying to make multithreaded programming easier,
and open-sourcing it is the only way that it will become popular enough for
most programmers to bother to learn it. Apple wants third-party software on
their systems to be multithreaded so that it won't make their system seem
slow. Similar things can be said about some of their other open-source
projects, like launchd.

Overall, it feels like open-source is one of Apple's tools for avoiding the
influence of monopolies. When Apple weakens existing monopolies or prevents
the formation of new ones, it has the side effect of helping all the other
little guys, too.

~~~
stonemetal
Oh I agree open standards and open source has saved their bacon and will again
in the future. To bad they seem intent to go the embrace and extend route.

~~~
wtallis
Where do you think Apple is doing an "embrace, extend, extinguish"? Can you
point to an open standard that they have added proprietary extensions to?

Apple definitely mixes open and proprietary components in their own systems,
but I don't see how that hurts any of the open parts, since the closed parts
serve different purposes.

~~~
stonemetal
They took free bsd made their own OS. Have they given back to BSD? Not in any
major way. Sure they released Darwin but now they started keeping parts back
to stop hackintoshes. They took KHTML for webkit sure they release source as
required but they don't contribute upstream. So they embrace and extend but so
far they have only taken from places that are so impoverished that their is no
point to extinguish(desktop freebsd, KHTML user share?)

~~~
blasdel
With KHTML they became the _de facto_ upstream very quickly, though it took a
few years for the KDE people to play along, become downstream, and make it _de
jure_.

Apple has employed a bunch of the FreeBSD developers, but there's really not
that much relevant code there, much less contributable code. The non-mac-
specific patches to the userland utilities does make it upstream.

You are correct in that most of the FOSS projects that Apple picks up were
playing for relative tiddlywinks before they came along with piles of money
(excepting GCC and maybe CUPS). They're one of the only companies that has
done this kind of thing with any success.

------
psadauskas
_Apple didn’t have to release WebKit as an open source project — they could
have taken the BSD-licensed KHTML and kept their derivative rendering engine
private._

Yes, they did have to release it as open source, as KHTML is LGPL, not BSD
licensed. I don't believe for a minute that Apple is any more open than they
are legally required to be, and even then only after some arm-twisting.

~~~
ekiru
If the copyleft portion of the LGPL applies to the parts of WebKit outside of
WebCore, then how could WebKit be released under the BSD license?

~~~
tfinniga
Good point, here's a block from the WebKit goals page.

WebKit should remain freely usable for both open source and proprietary
applications. To that end, we use BSD-style and LGPL licenses. Specifically,
we aim for licensing compatible with LGPL 2.1+. We do not currently plan to
move to LGPL 3. In addition, we strive to create a courteous, welcoming
environment that feels approachable to newcomers. WebKit maintains a public
IRC chat room and a public mailing list where the ideas of contributors both
new and old are heard and discussed with equal weight.

------
Poiesis
It would be an interesting move. I would see one or both of two things
happening. First, people would take it and run with it, eventually coming up
with a decent piece of software. Second, _Apple_ could do the same. Either
way, though, Adobe would lose control for sure.

The big question to me is, why isn't Adobe serious about making this
technology better? I mean, if Flash worked superbly well we might be not
having this discussion. If they want sole control, then it has to work. If
they can't fix it, find someone who can, or release it and let the masses
figure it out. I think Jobs is right, they're lazy. They wasted a good
position.

~~~
jdowdell
<em>"The big question to me is, why isn't Adobe serious about making this
technology better? I mean, if Flash worked superbly well we might be not
having this discussion."</em>

It's much better than it was, and about to become even moreso. The major part
of work over the past year has been invisible to you so far, but cross-device
predictability is coming from almost every major manufacturer this year.

The Apple problems are only partly about technology.

~~~
otakucode
I have always been under the impression that the primary sticking point with
Apple with regards to Flash is that it would allow the implementation of
everything in the App Store without involving Apple.

~~~
Xixi
On the other hand Flash wasn't welcome on the iPhone when Apple didn't want
native Apps made by third parties running on it... the App Store was an
afterthought, leaving Flash on the side of the road clearly was not.

Or maybe the App Store was just a very well kept secret...

------
ryandvm
I don't think Apple is thinking this through clearly enough.

It's pretty well agreed that Flash is a buggy resource hog (at least on non-
Windows platforms). Unfortunately, HTML5 is not quite a drop-in replacement
yet. Hell, even the AJAX/DHTML ninja at Google have to break down every now
and then and use Flash (StreetView, Google Talk, etc).

Additionally, you have the fact that Google has hinted that Flash _will_ be on
Android platform soon.

Though it would be great for web standards, the last thing Apple needs right
now is to be trying to force people to quite their Farmville-esque habits cold
turkey while the up-and-coming Android phones are beckoning them back into the
alleyways.

Apple must have some awfully spectacular features in the works for iPhone 4 if
they think they can pull this off...

~~~
DannoHung
What if they offer to pay for development of a Farmville app and a Hulu app
and just go through one by one knocking out all of the killer Flash apps and
turning them into native iPad/iPhone apps?

They've already got the YouTube app. And that looked pretty dang gorgeous.

~~~
glhaynes
Keep in mind that Adobe's already pushing their Flash-to-iPhone (App Store)
compiler.

And that many (most? I'd imagine!) Flash games would be rather sub-optimal, if
even playable, without modification to support multitouch instead of
keyboard/mouse.

So if I were Farmville, why wouldn't I just wrap my modified-to-support-
multitouch FLV with Adobe's tool and put it on the App Store?

------
Lazlo_Nibble
It's irrelevant. Apple has already decided they can move forward without
Flash. If they won Flash in the lottery they still wouldn't incorporate it in
their mobile platforms regardless of how clean the source is...why would they
bother?

Yes, there are still large parts of the web that rely on Flash. And popular
parts of the web. But none of them are _important_ parts of the web. There is
no critical Flash-based infrastructure that, if Flash went away tomorrow,
would prevent people across the Internet from doing their jobs. You can't run
Farmville without Flash, but Farmville is a fad...six months or a year or two
years from now people will be obsessing over some other online diversion.

The only people who _depend_ on Flash are the people who design and run the
sites with Flash content. Lots of others _enjoy_ Flash but can live without
it.

------
radley
_But what if the source code to Flash Player is — as many would wager — a huge
steaming pile of convoluted C++ horseshit? It’s sort of like what if Microsoft
open-sourced the Internet Explorer rendering engine._

Flash Player was rewritten for AS3. It's actually two engines: AVM 1 (Flash 8,
AS 1 & 2) and AVM 2 (Flash 9, AS3).

So only half of the pile actually stinks...

~~~
rbanffy
Why are you assuming the second pile got any moreattention to quality (vs. "we
have to ship it") than the first one?

~~~
radley
The point here is AVM2 is new, not "piled on" code like AVM1.

Pong: why should I assume they didn't payattention like somepeople are prone
todo?

~~~
rbanffy
Sorry. iPod Touch combined to fat fingers.

------
bootload
_"... I do understand the fear. It’s indisputable that Apple seeks large
amounts of control over its products. So it’s a reasonable question to ask
whether Apple sees the web itself, which they have no control over, as a
problem. I don’t think that’s the case at all, though. The web, as a whole, is
arguably the single most entrenched computer technology ever created. So where
Apple seeks control with regard to the web is in the technology to render it
..."_

The weakness or limitation of the Internet is it's Hubs. Compromise or take
down a hub and the network fails. Crackers go for DNS. A smart business will
try to monopolise publication of information, news and media. Publishing of
information on the Web is a Hub. Hence the tussle between traditional
newspapers and electronic publishers like Apple and news distributors like
Google.

------
elblanco
Then maybe we'd have a fast and stable implementation of it with things like
built in accessibility.

------
yumraj
_The problem for Flash is just like the problem for IE — the web has already
moved on._

I don't know which planet John is from, but the above is certainly not true on
my planet. Some people may _wish_ and/or _hope_ that, certainly, but the
reality is not that.

If he had written "the web wants/hopes/wishes/etc. to move on" I would have
paid more weight to the rest of the argument, but _"has already moves on"_ ,
yeah right.

------
DarthMark
So what exactly keeps someone from writing an open version of flash player? It
couldn't be that hard could it?

~~~
wmf
It is not so much hard as very tedious. The open source Flash clones look like
they have caught up to Flash 7 or 8 so far.

<http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/> <http://www.gnashdev.org/>

------
benologist
This started off interesting but quickly got tainted by retardedness... zomg
it's pointless opening it because the code is probably crap and zomg
everyone's already using teh html5 for everything!!! That same argument could
have been why _not_ to form Mozilla on the ghost of Netscape just a handful of
years ago.

I think the idea's got a lot of merit, it'd definitely help Adobe in that
someone competent could actually fix and stabilize their platform. But I also
think it'd be pointless, the iPhone/iPad would only get an Apple-tailored fork
with all app-like capabilities removed.

