A Letter to Adobe Flash: At Least Consider Open Source | Hacker News Reader

A Letter to Adobe Flash: At Least Consider Open Source

thechromesource.com

19 pointsdcawrey23 comments

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...

The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses,

Also an embarassingly awful codebase.

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.

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.

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.

There is a huge difference between open specification and open source.

Flash isn't an open standard by any useful definition.

Sure they specified the container format, bytecodes, and data structures — but everybody had figured that part out a long time ago because it's obvious and easy to capitalize on by developing an extractor. The runtime APIs are incredibly hard to reverse-engineer, comprise the vast bulk of the Flash implementation, and are the entire reason for the plugin's instability.

It's like saying that Windows is a completely open platform (save for the patents) just because Microsoft publishes a stable userland ABI and fairly comprehensive API documentation for downstream developers.

Gnash is no further along than ReactOS.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Just curious: What significant features could that be?

It doesn't really matter what it is, Adobe can get x to consumers years ahead of the W3 and browser vendors.