Beagleblog

Starting with the presentation of the iPad there was a flamewar going on between Flash lovers and haters in thousands of comments on various blog sites. Haters welcomed Apple's decision to not allow the Adobe Flash player on the iPad and saw the future of the multimedia web in HTML5. Flash proponents, on the other hand, said that HTML5 is just not ready and even if it was some things just aren't possible. Both were speculating on the Apples motivation to disallow Flash content on their iDevices, culminating in a recent change of their SDK license that was obviously targeted against the recently released Adobe Flash CS5 program that allowed developers to compile Flash content into native code.

Now Apple CEO Steve Jobs reacted with a rare open letter where he recounts the reasons for Apple's move. he starts with

"they say we want to protect our App Store ... Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true."

Now whether Flash is a closed or an open system is a matter we will delve into in just a second. How Jobs can claim that any of his systems are open is totally beyond me: App store, iPhone, iPad are all closed systems, as recently proven by their own moves. Apple takes the freedom to remove applications from the store as they please. I am aware of the fact that great parts of the Mac OS X are Open Source and I have found myself on several occasions to point Apple haters to that fact. Core parts of the OS like Cocoa aren't open though, so how much is there for an open system?

Jobs continues to claim:

"Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc."

Now the Apple CEO is either misinformed or flat-out lying. Adobe Flash is "open" in several respects. First there are the Flash specifications, namely SWF and FLV video. Both are open and a while ago Adobe has lifted the ban on open implementations of any Flash software. Compare that to the Apple license mentioned above. Adobe has donated the Tamarin Actionscript compiler to the Mozilla foundation quite a while ago. Actionscript 3 is in itself an open standard based on the ECMAScript spec. Finally Adobe has released the Flex compiler as an open source project, that covers the whole Flash development process.

Closed products Adobe still has are the Flash Media Server and last not least the Flash Player browser plugin, that Adobe delivers free of charge. It is true that this makes Flash a platform that is not 100% open. But claiming the opposite is just not true. In my opinion Adobe should just do us all a favour and release the source code for the Flash player so discussions like this have an end.

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