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Comment by not_an_alien | Hacker News Reader

Funny, because you're able to create SWF content using only free, open source software, including their own compiler. I don't believe your point holds. Do you ever do any Flash work?

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The same could be said of the CLR, and there have been efforts like Mono to replicate it independently of Microsoft. Nevertheless, in practice Microsoft control the .NET platform and the CLR. Like any other platform, they can control what underlying features of the OS or hardware it does or doesn't support, and they can give their tooling an advantage over free, open source tooling.

For example, what if they add a new set of op codes to the next release? Don't their tools arrive in the marketplace with full support of the new op codes while the free, open source tools must toil away to replicate them?

We can quibble about how much advantage their tools have in the marketplace, but unlike the late Sun Microsystems they are very clear about being in the business of making money from tools and commoditizing operating systems, browsers, and hardware to support that business model.

Except Microsoft doesn't provide fully functional implementations of the CLR for a reasonable set of platforms. Microsoft intentionally crippled the CLR on non-Windows OSes, and continues to do so.

> Microsoft intentionally crippled the CLR on non-Windows OSes, and continues to do so.

Citation needed. I'm a heavy .NET user on both MS.NET and Mono, and I've never seen this crippling you speak of.

I guess I lump .NET together with Silverlight, and the software I have to use for work is currently unusable on Moonlight.

I have attempted to run a .NET platform product, Keepass, on OS X via Mono and it crashes almost without provocation.

Sure you can create content with free open source tools and yeah there are some oss runtimes. But the runtime that the majority of the world has installed is created by adobe. If a new platform/os has a new feature, you still have to wait for adobe to support it in the vm. So no, flash isn't really that open. Adobe controls and drives its direction.

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