OK, you know the news. It’s all over the place already. So rather than repeat the details that everyone has already posted, I’ll just take the one small bit of it that I find amusing.
When this was announced, I was talking to Ted Patrick, and told him this was really mean, because it was going to cause certain people to drop what they were doing and spend a lot of time thinking up new things about Adobe to complain about. I underestimated them. Already, I’ve heard that it’s too late, it’s not enough, and they are doing it for the wrong reasons. Oh well, everyone’s entitled to their opinion. Carry on with the awesome work, Adobe.
Anyway you look at it – this is an awesome move. It allows more creativity among the community, it allows more people to embrace this technology and move beyond the browser. It allows for more involvement and its a win win situation.
Yeah, it’s funny whenever I hear people say “too little, too late” about this sort of thing. Those are the folks who would probably find a way to complain if Flash Player went open source. Surprisingly, though, the discussion at Slashdot was semi-positive. Sure, some folks were negative because they think Flash is the devil, but a lot of people seemed to think it was a good step.
It’s a great move. Don’t get me wrong. But, I would expect people to complain that the player isn’t open. I’m not exactly sure what Adobe’s business model would be if they opened that… but I think, even then, certain folks would still not like Flash.
It’s good to see Adobe not only making great products but also making great decisions too.
I have no doubt that if they open sourced Flex Builder and the player, people would still complain that it’s not on Linux. And if they handled that, people would complain about their underhanded tactic to take over the industry by open sourcing everything. 🙂
Pretty much there will always be people out there that are going to be overly demanding and completely disregarding that Adobe is a business example. And yes for the rest of this week it’ll be “flash player, flex builder 2, 3 and flash CS3 IDE, should be released.” I guess my view is if you dislike paying for it-go build a better one and put it out there. Plus i think it helps to have a company that pays it’s employees to get stuff done to be in charge of those apps. I’m not sure I’m ready for 300 different flash players out there or waiting for FB3 because the volunteers don’t have enough time outside of work. From my view i like paying money and having something work and be polished. I think we should all appreciate how well adobe is supporting us with these solutions.
Ah, so Keith is talking with Ted and is just part of the conspiracy to keep things positive!
🙂
Grrrrr just tried running the flash player under DOS 3.1 doesn’t work! Common Adobe.
hehehehe just joking 😉
The motivation to write this post is that I don´t understand so many comments saying that an open source Flash Player would be something terrible. Some random thoughts:
Maybe I´m wrong, but I don´t see why would there be 300 different flash players. Any examples? We don´t have 300 different Open Offices, Firefoxes, VLC media players, or GAIMs …
When a program is released as open source it doesn´t mean no one is in control. As you can read in the Adobe information page about this move, they will still be in control of the FLEX development. It becomes an open and transparent proccess, but not total chaos. This fear about tons of different incompatible Players reminds of the argument against open source in general, something like “people working on their free time can not agree and create a quality product”. There are ways to avoid this, and I think one can see around that it´s a method that works. On the other hand, in something as important as this, there would be probably people interested in messing things up, like with the open document format. Couldn´t that be solved with the right license?
One case I know a bit is SciTE, the text editor I use for coding in ActionScript. It´s open source, but those in charge are quite strict, and decide exactly which contributed code is accepted in the official release and which not. The Linux kernel is also another example of strict development, where each change in the code is checked many times before it´s accepted.
The fact that we could create a new version of Flash Player, doesn´t mean we could distribute millions of copies of an incompatible Player around (except if we are M$!).
I´ve heard more than once developers say they are not interested in Flash because it´s not open source, so they prefer to stay away from it.
I find there is something funny in this situation, where we get to create applications with open source software, but to be able to view the results we must use a closed source program. If the whole web goes Flash, and someone owns Flash, that someone could flip a switch and stop the whole web, couldn´t it? Or a bit less dramatic: the player could be saving our browsing habits without we knowing. That wouldn´t be so easy in an open source version.
In any case I think relesing FLEX as open source is great news.
Ted Rocks \m/, Lets have a beer.
I think that Adobe are being an excellent example in terms of finding a good middle road between open source and non-open source business models. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve got the right attitude. There are plenty of people who would probably complain about just about anything, and – like a previous poster said – if they went fully open source, those people would then probably complain that they’ve got some underhanded tactic to overtake and monopolise the industry. You won’t ever make those kind of people happy. In my opinion, you shouldn’t even bother!