...To A Dead End
I really do not want to give Adobe any more publicity in their Flash campaign, but felt compelled to blog-respond to Dave McAllister's "Following the open trail" post on his Open at Adobe blog.
Flash is not open.
Dave takes a shot at groups like the W3C, whom I'll focus on for part of this bit. No standard is "perfect", but standards themselves benefit greatly from a decent-sized, diverse, unbiased (in the generic sense of the term...we all have biases) collection of individuals. If this were not the case, XML, SOAP would have been a complete failure and HTML 5 & CSS 3 would not embraced by so many designers and high profile sites. Even if we move into IETF territory, what would OAuth, IMAP or our beloved RFC 2616 (HTTP :-) look like if it were all controlled by one business with it's own agenda?
I don't need closed tools to build web sites, craft data repositories or design code to access web services. I can use (if I had any graphic or design talent) thoughtfully-debated, cross-platform markup to build incredibly useful services that are accessible from practically any device. And I can pass credentials, check my e-mail and surf the internet to dribble like this post knowing that Very Smart People have discussed the efficacy of each protocol.
Given that the target audience for Dave's post were those that are not exactly Flash proponents, I do find it semi-amusing that he did not bother to ensure the availabity of an HTML 5 compatible YouTube page for the "Open at Adobe" link (or that it did not link directly to an HTML 5 representation).
With regard to open sourcing the Flash player, I'm not sure what that would really buy the "community". Publishing the Flash SWF, RTMP & other file formats does not make Flash "open". Microsoft published their Office XML file formats with the intent to keep you locked in to their products. Not exactly a compelling argument. Furthermore, if they were truly being honest about the open source Player argument, they could take the route of Paint.NET and utilize creative licensing for some of the code and not release other components that would be in violation of their contractual obligations.
I will admit that the list of truly open source frameworks is accurate and should be lauded, even though the ultimate destination is the Flash platform for most of them. It should be ironic to all (except for, perhaps, Adobe staff) that they have built reliance on WebKit: the open source rendering engine that powers Safari, Chrome and a few other browsers and apps.
Flash is not and will not be "open". Adobe wants you feeding from their trough and buying their expensive tools for as long as possible. It is no different (except for the fact they made versions for multiple platforms) than Microsoft ActiveX or browser-specific tags (how many of you are in an enteprise where internal apps just do not work under Gecko- or WebKit-based browsers?). It is this same lack of openness, combined with the creativity, ingenuity and collaboration of countless smart folks on knock-down-drag-out standards bodies that will ultimately mean the end of Flash.
