

Official reasons why Adobe doesn't open-source Flash - swombat
http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail.html

======
madars
From Wikipedia:

    
    
        On 20 January 2009 Adobe announced it will publish the RTMP specification.
        On 21 May 2009 Adobe filed a DMCA removal request on a Sourceforge-hosted
        implementation of the protocol.
    

And now we are about to believe that:

    
    
        The Flash file format (SWF) specifications are open and unrestricted, so any
        company - even Apple - can build their own Flash Player if they want. Also
        freely available are related specifications for the Flash ecosystem: RTMP
        FLV/F4V, AMF, and MCD.

~~~
Flow
Post this info in a reply on that blog entry plz.

Or maybe you did, but their "Open at Adobe" moderator didn't approve it.:)

~~~
pingswept
I've just submitted this comment (we'll see if it gets posted):

\--

Hello Mr. McAllister,

I'm glad to hear that Adobe has opened as much as they have. That's the right
direction; I'm glad you're doing it.

I'm a little concerned about your claim that anyone can implement SWF, RTMP,
and so forth. Didn't Adobe issue a DMCA takedown when someone implemented
RTMP?

Here's a copy of what appears to be the takedown notice:
[http://www.chillingeffects.org/anticircumvention/notice.cgi?...](http://www.chillingeffects.org/anticircumvention/notice.cgi?NoticeID=25159)

I recognize that that the takedown notice says it was issued because the
implementation "can be used to download copyrighted works," not because it's
an implementation of RTMP. That's a silly argument-- every web browser that
uses a Flash player downloads content before it plays it. How could one
implement RTMP, the "Real-Time Messaging Protocol" without sending any
messages?

I'm willing to believe that there might be some misunderstanding here-- maybe
there are two parts to the RTMP spec, and only one is open, or something like
that. But at the outset, I can't reconcile what you've written with the rest
of the evidence that I see.

Perhaps you could explain what I'm missing?

~~~
swombat
Utterly uber-lame that _no_ comments get posted on an article about how Adobe
is being open.

Open my arse.

~~~
pingswept
Well, it is Sunday morning. I'm not checking for comments on my work blog
either.

------
ZeroGravitas
That's not a list of reasons, it's just repeating the standard Adobe talking
points (which from the manner and number of times they do it _must_ be a
corporate policy of some sort).

What does he say:

* Standards are slow to innovate (i.e. we are better than HTML)

* We pay H.264 licence fees, and this is some big philanthropic gesture to the world.

* Flash is "open" (for values of "open" not widely recognised in the industry)

He points out that Apple could build their own Flash player from scratch. He
doesn't realise that they neither want to nor need to go on such a wild goose
chase as they have everything they need in the combination of native and
HTML5. I think that would continue to be true even if Flash was properly
opened.

Open Source folks have been reverse engineering Flash for years because they
were worried they'd be shut out of the web. Adobe have only opened up now
because the tipping point has past and they no longer have a position of
strength.

Just like no web streaming fees for H.264 this is an admission of weakness. If
Flash or H.264 was as far ahead of the competition as their respective fanboys
claim then they'd be using that unassailable position to extract cold hard
cash on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is what Adobe did for years on every platform apart from desktops and
while it probably earned them a ton of cash it stunted the market and led to
stagnation. They claim to have turned this around with the Open (there's that
word again) Screen Project but it's all been talk for the last 2 years.

------
mdasen
I think Adobe is trying to negate a lot of bad press that they're getting in
the techie community. It started with Jobs/Apple saying that they crash a lot
and continued with all of our old complaints being dredged up.

Adobe claimed that they don't ship Flash Players with any known crashing bugs.
They had a great blog post and it made at least me feel that maybe it wasn't
their fault. Then the evidence is presented that they not only ship with known
crashing bugs, but neglect to fix them for years.

Now comes the argument that they aren't allowed to open-source Flash because
some of it is non-free. However, madars has already pointed out that Adobe has
taken legal action over the RTMP protocol
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1107585>) and, similarly (although a tad
dated) Rob Savoye of the Gnash (GNU Flash) project has said:

 _The Adobe EULA for Flash forbids anyone who has installed their Flash tools
or plugin from working on Flash technologies. This has had a chilling effect
on the development of free Flash players, since a developer must either choose
to decide that Adobe won't sue them over this, or to do what Gnash does, which
is a slow and inefficient, clean room, reverse engineering project._

 _Adobe has declined to comment on this issue, since the confusion benefits
their lockin of the market. Although Adobe has said they support Open Source
projects, and donated Tamarin to Mozilla, we'd love to see a public statement
that Gnash developers won't be subject to a lawsuit. It's very difficult to
find developers that have never installed the Adobe software ever, which is
what we've been doing to maintain our clean room approach._

(<http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/30>)

Adobe's hasn't been given a lot of hassle over Flash for a long time. We've
kind of accepted that it was free as in beer, ran on Linux (if poorly), etc.
Now we're seeing that Flash could become _the_ barrier to HTML5 and we're
finally re-evaluating Adobe's patronage. We've found out that we don't want to
be Adobe's ward - protected, well-fed, etc. We want to be able to live and
innovate for ourselves.

~~~
BearOfNH
_It's very difficult to find developers that have never installed the Adobe
software ever_

Kids -- by which I mean anybody under 18 -- cannot enter into contracts. An
Adobe EULA cannot be enforced against somebody so young. In lawyer-speak the
EULA is "voidable" (as opposed to "void").

So all you'd need do is hire 'em young and make sure they don't agree to
anything once they turn 18.

IANAL, do this at your own risk, yada-yada-yada.

------
mtarnovan
"The main reason we can't release Flash Player as open source is because there
is technology in the Player that we don't own".

Bullshit. Why don't you open source everything else then ?

~~~
potatolicious
Yeah, the reasoning is pretty thin here, which is really somewhat insulting.
Listen Adobe, it's _okay_ to say "we would like to make money from our code
base and must keep it proprietary"... in fact I'd prefer if you'd said that
rather than make up a plain-old lie.

------
ams6110
"Official reasons" ???

The subhead of this blog states: _Please note that opinions expressed within
are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Adobe._

~~~
simonk
The blog is at <http://blogs.adobe.com> and called "Open at Adobe".

The person writing it is Director of Open Source and Standards (OSS) at Adobe,
its an official comment.

~~~
otakucode
Perhaps they should amend their disclaimer to say "but it does not NOT
necessarily represent the views of Adobe either."

------
swombat
For what it's worth, I think Adobe has two paths in front of it:

1) Resolve the licensing issue and transfer ownership of the Flash player code
to the community, and do that _quickly_. This, with plenty of cooperation with
the community, could mean that Flash development is taken over by the
community, and it may even be integrated into HTML5 in some way.

2) Rebuild their culture to be competitive. Reported, documented, reproducible
crash bugs hanging around for years are inexcusable, for any reason. The main
reason I see for this is their slow culture that allows long release cycle and
a "we'll fix it in the next release" attitude.

I suspect the second one is far harder to fix, so my recommendation would be
for the first one.

~~~
pavs
What do you mean by "Resolve the licensing issue"? They don't own H.264, how
do you want them to "resolve" something they don't own?

~~~
swombat
Problems can always be resolved.

Some things are truly impossible (change the taste of the colour purple), some
are technically impossible (fly by flapping your wings), and some are just
impossible due to disagreements between people (release an open-source
implementation of a closed codec).

If you can resolve the first, you're God. If you can resolve the second,
you're a technological visionary. If you can resolve the third, you're a good
politician. Only the first category can be really considered impossible to
achieve. Resolving licensing issues with H.264 is hardly impossible in that
respect.

~~~
pavs
What do you _mean_ by "resolving"? You want adobe to buy H.264 and give it
away for free? That's pretty much impossible.

You can't just throw around the word "resolve" things without understanding
the complexity or nature of the possible solutions.

~~~
swombat
I _mean_ "do 'stuff' that makes the problem 'go away'".

As a former management consultant, and now a start-up founder, believe me, I
speak from experience when I say every problem of this kind is solvable if you
want to do it badly enough.

~~~
pavs
There is only "one stuff" they can do to make the problem go away (in your
words "resolving licensing issues"), which is, they can buy H.264 and give it
away for free (open source it), which is impossible without making themselves
bankrupt.

The other stuff that I can think of is that they can use Ogg Theora, which is
hardly a solution, considering (IMO) it is an inferior codec.

~~~
lftl
_they can buy H.264 and give it away for free (open source it), which is
impossible without making themselves bankrupt._

As the discussion around H.264/Theora etc has heated up I've started wondering
about this. There are now at least 3 rather large players with relatively deep
pockets that all have licensed h.264 for products they essentially give away.
So what if Google, Apple, and Adobe all pooled together and purchased the
patents for h.264 and licensed it for free (or possibly a free non-commercial
license, and force any other big players using it to chip in). I wonder what
the price tag on that would be.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I can't believe this number is correct, but one of the Xiph guys claimed that
the MPEG 2 patents (i.e. DVDs), which are all still in force and built on top
of for MPEG-4 part2 and part 10 (i.e H.264) took in $67 dollars for every
person on the planet in 2008.

That's half a trillion dollars in a year, and that's not even counting revenue
they get from MPEG-4 or the audio codecs.

------
TallGuyShort
As someone who programs in ActionScript very often and makes heavy use out of
RTMP, I'm very well aware of Flash's shortcomings and how quickly they would
be fixed if it were more open. However, I really wish discussions like this
weren't full of so much empty talk. If you don't like Flash, don't use it.
Uninstall the Flash player and leave it all behind. Fact is, they have
succeeded in getting a proprietary and commerically-trusted video codec
available for the masses. If you think that is such a small feat, or such an
insignficant reason to keep it closed, I challenge you to do better. If a lot
of people really didn't like Flash and actually didn't something about it,
Adobe would get the message REAL quick.

~~~
protomyth
I think the HTML5 people are doing just that, and I think this string of blog
posts Adobe is pushing out is the reaction. I think the bigger problem is that
Adobe Flash team and certain Adobe executives are not quite dealing with what
their customers are telling them in a mature way or totally truthful way. This
tends to annoy people.

------
est
I got a similar response on why Google Talk's standalone Win32 client can not
be open sourced: because there's a GlobalIPSound module in it.

But still I think FlashPlayer/GoogleTalk can be open sourced, just leave the
proprietary module as a stub, just like the Chromium without H.264 and
Bookmark Sync.

------
steve19
Like Sun and Java, I think Adobe will eventually open source but when they
finally do it, it will be too little too late.

~~~
brown
I think Java developers everywhere were happy that Sun opened up Java, but
does anyone think it was a good business decision?

~~~
nzmsv
Why not? The JRE was a free download for end users anyway, and open-sourcing
it removed a large source of bad press. If Java was open-sourced earlier, it
might have seen more adoption by hackers, and innovation. Now, it's an
"enterprise" language, which basically means it has entered the "legacy" stage
of its lifetime, and will go the way of COBOL in under 10 years.

~~~
rbanffy
Well... COBOL and Fortran have been going the dinossaur way for far more than
10 years and show no sign of disappearing...

~~~
nzmsv
Yes, but would you start a new project in COBOL today?

~~~
rbanffy
That's a silly question. I am a computer conservationist proud of a growing
computer collection. Of course I would, just for the kick of it!

I would like, of course, to run it on an IBM /360, or, if that were not
possible, an emulator. You would access it via your own 3270 terminal. It
would be made to look specially cool on 3290s - wouldn't be hard: _anything_
looks cool on a 3290. I would develop it while wearing a white lab coat.

A Burroughs B-series would also be considered ;-)

Now, seriously, no. I wouldn't start a new product (I can conceive lots of
maintenance projects done in whatever was already done to maintain code
commonality) in COBOL.

And yes, you would have a hard time convincing me of starting one in Java too.
I cringe even when someone proposes one in PHP.

------
kreneskyp
Even Real [Networks] figured out how open source the majority of their code
base while retaining support for closed technologies such as h.264.

The only reason Adobe can't open their code is lack of effort.

------
motters
Although Flash is very popular today, if Adobe don't open source their format
then it will be superseded by others. To me the arguments for not going open
source given by Adobe seem weak and unconvincing.

~~~
bartl
The Flash (SWF) format _is_ open (or, so Adobe says)... But their software
isn't.

~~~
ssp
Their flash specification is not complete.

The blend modes are not specified there. Two of those are strange, flash
specific ones that you have to reverse engineer, but the others are similar to
PDF.

~~~
wolfgke
On <http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/> you can read:

"Adobe seriously considers all feedback to the SWF file format specification.
E-mail any unclear or potentially erroneous information within the
specification to Adobe at flashformat@adobe.com."

Has already someone asked for clarification of these details? I ask because
the answer would state a lot about Adobe's relation to open specifications.

------
santagada
Just put the h.264 code in a directory that is in a closed repository. Why is
that soo hard? I don't believe the h.264 license limits the exposure of your
internal api.

~~~
santagada
ahh and the chrome/chromium browser has done just that so it is not even
novelty.

------
cammil
What are peoples views here on using Flash for rich internet applications? In
particular, what do you think are the benefits of using Flash/Flex?

It seems to me that development for prototyping and proof of concept is
cheaper and quicker in Flash/Flex and is still usable by a massive portion of
internet users, even if it will not be in the future.

~~~
protomyth
HTML5 doesn't really have good software developer support in the way Flash
does. I am waiting for some small software company to do a designer's tool for
HTML5.

------
coderdude
I'm surprised that no one is concerned that open sourcing Flash would be
dangerous. Flash is installed on some 95% of machines, or so I read. If they
open source Flash and allow everyone the ability to find the holes, we'll have
a flood of exploits that affect _everyone_. I thank Adobe for keeping their
implementation of Flash closed source.

