Guest post by It annoys me that Flash is required for most video sites. Especially when Flash isn’t available on a lot of devices or at least not the latest, required version. Whenever I try to use my Internet Tablet to watch shows on sites like Hulu, Veoh, Crackle, Joost, etc., I can’t, because they require a newer version of Flash, and I’m stuck with what I have. Thankfully not every site uses the latest version. At least not yet anyways.
Whenever I’m watching those shows on my computer, I have to turn the volume way up so that I can hear it over my internal fans. Flash causes them to sound like an airplane taking off, which I think is stupid because they don’t do that when I play DVDs.
Also, it annoys me that Flash has its own separate controls and settings. I miss having the usual “Save Target As” and “Copy Target URL” options from the right-click menu. Plus, I miss being able to view the source, since often I want to find hidden links to targets (images, files etc.). I also don’t like how Flash has its own separate cookies, since they’re tricky to find, letting websites get away with doing really sneaky things (like resurrecting browser cookies).
The worst part is that there is no way for me, or anyone other than Adobe to fix it. Normally with problems relating to internet surfing there are a billion people that can fix them. That can’t happen with Flash Player problems, because there is only one compatible, viable implementation of it, and no one other than Adobe can make changes to it. So what I think Adobe needs to do is make the Flash Player open source.
Isn’t Flash Open Enough?
Adobe would probably claim that because they made their specifications more available that Flash is open enough, but vendor-specific specifications based off of complex, querky implimentations never yield any compatible alternative’s. Just look at Java, it’s been open spec for 15 years, and there still aren’t any compatible alternatives.
A clue that this is a problem with the Flash specifications is Gnash, currently the only actively developed Flash Player alternative. The Gnash developers say they long ago reverse-engineered what’s now in the official specifications. Still, you’ll be hard pressed to find any video sites that work with it. So you’re still dependent on one vendor (Adobe) to make changes to the only compatible Flash plug-in.
How Adobe could open source Flash Player.
Adobe has repeatedly given the same excuses for not open sourcing Flash: They don’t own all of the code, and they’re afraid everyone would split off a bunch of popular but incompatible Flash plug-ins. None of those excuses hold water because Sun open sourced Java, and successfully dealt with those very same concerns.
Basically all Adobe would have to do is repeat what Sun did when they open sourced Java:
- Announce the Open Source Flash Player project.
- Set up the repository, and a system for contributing to the project.
- Start releasing the pieces of Flash they own under 2 licenses: copyleft and commercial.
- Provide the encumbered parts as binary plugs until a substitute is ready.
- Gradually eliminate the need for binary plugs until the whole project is open source.
Bingo! There you have it. Flash could then be improved on by everyone, and eventually not suck.
About the author:
RichterKuato is a internet surfer and amateur comic illustrator/writer, who regularly comes up with ways to fix things.
I don’t see why they don’t open the source. They give the binary away for free. Especially on Linux, they could really save themselves quite a headache by just opening the source.
AFAIK they specialize in the content creation tools and flash is more a means to an end. So, I see two reasons that they don’t open source flash. First, given how buggy and apparently difficult to port it is, the code is probably crap and opening it would reveal that (and give rise to innumerable exploits). Second, with open specifications one could create competing flash creation tools.
The specifications are already open. Adobe used to have clauses in the Flash license that barred the creation of authoring tools – those are all gone, since you can now use the MPL Flex tool chain to build Flash apps for whatever purpose you please. There is also haXe, and a few other third party compilers that don’t require permission from Adobe for anything at all.
On code quality – I can’t think of anything particularly egregious in the Tamarin code base (the open source runtime engine for Actionscript 3.0 – and containing nan-jit the basis for Mozilla’s tracing JavaScript engine) – maybe you are right about the rest of the code base. We can’t know until it’s open source.
There are already competing Flash content creation tools right now – there is nothing stopping Adobe for example from licensing Flash technology for those wishing to export to Flash from their applications and yet leave the plugin open sourced. Just because something is open doesn’t mean it is a free for all – for those who believe that, you’ve been reading far too much ‘get the facts’ documents from Microsoft.
humor me, why would adobe want to open source flash?
apple doesnt like flash because it is a runtime scriptable environment they can not control. It is in their agreement. They dont like to mention this because its not a good PR move so they spin it saying flash is a resource hod(yes it is) or inherently bad because its cross platform(no it isnt) ..it doesnt matter what adobe will do,apple will never allow it.
Content providers like flash because it works on most playforms, what other solution works for you mr. author? quicktime plugin, real audio plugin? window media plugin?
Content provides want to protect their streams with DRM, any suggestions on how an open source flash runtime can do that? .. your issue here should be with content providers, not flash. All these content provides will go to silverlight the minute flash stop protecting their streams
What codec would you also prefer to be used? theora? how many devices supports it? h.264? why not call for its onwers to open it up first if you want an open web?
i use linux full time,flash annoyes me, i agree with RMS and i think theora or any other patent free codec is the best alternative for the web but this flash bashing is getting a little bit out of hand, IMHO
I personally believe this is the #1 reason we don’t have open source Flash Player from Adobe. Content providers don’t want you to right-click, save-as on a video stream. Once this becomes common place, they “lose”. They still haven’t accepted the notion that people should be able to view content without DRM.
Maybe you haven’t accepted that content providers want to sell movie rentals and naked video would just lead to a browser extension that converts the video into a local file with a single click.
If Adobe open sourced Flash there would also be a hacked version that allows ads to be skipped or blocked.
The parent poster is correct in that this would just lead content producers to embrace Silverlight.
Pprograms and browser extensions already exist to do that.
The Firefox extensions that exist only work for unprotected video. You need special software to take something like Hulu or Netflix video.
That’s true enough. I doubt the likes of Hulu, Amazon or Netflix will ever support an unprotected delivery pipeline. We’ll always have to rely third party software (browser plugins or apps) to utilize those services because of the nature of them.
And that’s mostly becaise they – unlike YT – provide companies-created content, not a user-created one.
Having access to the engine’s source code doesn’t change on iota how difficult it is to rip a DRM’d stream from an app that runs on that engine.
Agreed. It’s all about controling what you can, and what you can’t extract from the author’s creation, but that’s a bad way to ensure the rights of an author.
It’s just am intellectual property’s nature that it cannot be controlled in any reasonable way, because it is not material. It just has a materialistic carrier.
DRM components of Flash Player could exist in some type of plugin system where they themselves are not open sourced. It seems like that would take significant re-engineering of how Flash Player works, though…
If there was an open source Flash player, then poeple would simply fail to plug in any DRM plugin.
Actually, there are some open source Flash players (an example):
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
These open source Flash players don’t do DRM.
There is even a version which includes perfectly legal use of a h.264 decoder (by using the decoder embedded within the system’s paid-for video card):
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzU1MA
I don’t care about that stuff. I just want to have my “Save Target As” option back. If content providers don’t like it they can just go to Silverlight for all I care.
Hopefully not all content providers are annal about copying. Right now I don’t think video creators have much of a choice in the matter, Flash just doesn’t have that option by default. They have to actually add that option themselves with which I bet not everyone knows how to do.
“apple doesnt like flash because it is a runtime scriptable environment they can not control. It is in their agreement. They dont like to mention this because its not a good PR move so they spin it saying flash is a resource hod(yes it is) or inherently bad because its cross platform(no it isnt) ..it doesnt matter what adobe will do,apple will never allow it.”
D’oh, it’s not about Apple, really. They don’t mean too much outside U.S, believe me.
It’s about a gazillions of internet users with geek attitude, who were always *pissed off* on this piece of crap called flash that slows their OSs down, is buggy and hell to deal, and it’s closed source. Apple is just a recent argument, just a god damn fly on a cake.
Your bargain basement crappy little 330mhz OMAP 2420 (advertised as 400mhz, which is bullshit without a third party overclocking applet) that likely couldn’t handle SVG animations in realtime can’t manage Flash – who’d have thought!!!
Christmas on a cracker that thing has about as much processing power as the MIPS in my Dingoo – lemme guess, does it struggle doing SNES emulation as well?
If you are going to bitch about Flash, do it on a device powerful enough to RUN real time animations and h.264 OR theora video in the first place, and not some glorified PDA someone slapped a big display on!
We’re talking a 330mhz ARM6, a mediocre 220mhz C55 dsp, a powerVR GPU less powerful than a Voodoo 2, and 128 MEGS of RAM…
You don’t see me bitching that my 600mhz Athlon from 1999 can’t handle modern flash content!
GAH – what the HELL?!?
Edited 2010-05-15 00:00 UTC
I doubt one could directly compare clocks of a modern mobile chip that probably supports h.264 hardware acceleration against a desktop chip from a decade ago as a means to estimate relative performance.
Hence my selecting TWICE the clock speed and assuming it has a BETTER GPU.
Besides, the C55 DSP isn’t exactly what I’d call a h.264 hardware assist, especially under Meamo. At 220mhz you are lucky it manages MP3 decoding; which is what it is basically in there to do which is why it’s a DSP only, NOT an ISP.
The device can barely manage native playback of Mpeg2, much less MP4 Video at anything more than standard def… and frankly video was not it’s focus as it’s a mediocre little handheld one step removed from their phones.
If we were talking the Nokia N900, ok, THEN you can complain about it… 600mhz ARM 8, a modern decoder in the form of the 430mhz C64x+ DSP/ISP – about equal to a 1.2ghz Celeron M WITH a modern video hardware decoder – the performance should be equal to an Ion equipped 1.6ghz Atom.
Even the video hardware itself – comparing the OMAP 2340’s “PowerVR MBX lite” to the “PowerVR 530 SGX” is like comparing a Riva 128 to a GeForce 2…
Complaining about it on the N810 is like complaining about it on a PSP or an old Pentium 3. The hardware just isn’t there to do the job in the first place. The ARM 6 CPU being about equal to twice the clockspeed in a Pentium 3 (so about 1.8x the clock speed in a gen 1 thunderbird, hence my choice of 600mhz athlon), the DSP being relatively useless for h.264 or other modern decoding since it lacks the ISP commands of later versions, and the integrated “PowerVR MBX lite” being about equal to an old nVidia Riva board or an old ATI Rage 128.
Reducing the article to little more than pointless flash bashing.
THINK people. Rub a couple brain cells together. You might as well have complained about trying to run flash on one of the phones that comes free with one of the $40/mo talk only cell service plans… like the crappy little OMAP 850 powered HTC I’ve been looking at.
Edited 2010-05-15 01:18 UTC
deathshadow, you are often correct (and I agree fully with your comment), but you always sound like an obnoxious lunatic.
Could you please try to be more calm when you post?
I AM an obnoxious lunatic – state certified. Lost it about eight years ago when I got sick of all the idiocy out there.
I’m an old school back-woods New England Yankee – we are NOT… a friendly people. We will tell you to your face something sucks – since slapping the rose coloured glasses on someone’s head and leading them down the garden path with some “it’s all good” back-slapping isn’t going to accomplish a damned thing.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw
Platitudes and forced pleasantry is more insulting and degrading than anything I’ve said.
Edited 2010-05-16 03:38 UTC
Whatever.
Youtube and MegaVideo still work on it. I just can’t watch anything that requires the latest Flash Player.
I really don’t think it’s impossible for the latest Flash to work on it. At least not the parts I need for watching videos.
Buy an ipod touch if you want to watch portable movies.
No need for Flash and you don’t have to be tethered to the internet.
But I don’t want to buy another device. Also, I don’t want to have to copy videos from another device I’d rather just watch them online.
I’ll tell the secret again: it’s the software one buys the hardware for, and not vice versa. In the case of personal computing devices, it’s not the hardware you use, it’s the applications. If you have a certain requirement for running applications, you’ll buy the hardware that is able to handle it, not buy a worse one, then complain about the software being crappy. Persona computing hardware is no a fashion accessory, it’s a patform that enables you to run the apps that you need for creativity, leisure, work, etc. If it holds one back, it’s hardly fitting the purpose one bought it for.
Yadda yadda. Maybe he bought it a while back and anyways:
Which small mobile device that plays all Flash content is he supposed to buy right now?
Your response was too reasonable. Mod parent down please.
Bull crap. That’s what the clots like Adobe or MS made you believe. Internet is for everyone.
Don’t let yourself believe in that crap. As long as your device can display webpages they should be accessible, and they are not, because some moron decided to use flash that makes every device slow down to hell.
Internet is for everyone, not only for gamers with latest GPUs. You don’t need that crap to simply VIEW a video.
Dingux doesn’t struggle with SNES.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBMOYSthmjQ
Peace, Love and Linux, my friend. Just replace the slow proprietary crap from your Dingo. (And chill, otherwise people will think you are the most asocial asshole around.)
Huh, for me all the dingux emulators are useless compared to the native uC OS ones… well, unless I run the little 400mhz overclock – at which point I’d just run the 400mhz overclock in uC.
Which I added a sheet of copper as a heat sink inside it for just that reason – gotta love underclocking so you can run a CPU without cooling; you’d almost think it was made by Apple.
Edited 2010-05-16 03:30 UTC
For you everything that you didn’t do seems to be useless. Maybe you are the problem? ever thought about that?
That looks really cool.
You must have believed in that ‘endless upgrade’ crap from MS, haven’t you? It’s not about being ‘up to date’. It’s about being up to every device out there. Why? because internet is for everyone and internet sites should simply SCALE to every friggin’ device that CAN actually connect to net and display a website. Still don’t get it? get some IT lessons and learn from the history.
With an open-source Flash Player comes the possibility of other people making their own (cheaper) alternative to the Flash component of Adobe’s CS. I don’t think they want that.
I prefer to wait Flash die closed and, in the mean time, wait for HTML 5.
Don’t hold your breath in the mean time. Flash isnt going anywhere any day soon.
This is never a good way to think. A lot of open-source projects are born from existing proprietary softwares. Even HTML5 benefits from software that weren’t open sourced at first, if I’m right, SpiderMonkey used by the Mozilla foundation wasn’t open source when it was owned by Netscape.
The good way to think is that now HTML5 has to benefits from Flash and not that Flash must be killed by HTML5 or vice versa. And for this, Flash has to be open sourced. There’s a lot of thing to learn from Flash, even if this sounds weird today where Flash is so criticized. Adobe done some good things in this way when they opened Tamarin and “given” it to the Mozilla foundation to create a new JavaScript engine^aEUR| But today they have to do something stronger and to really engage themselves in an open-source strategy by fully open-sourcing Flash and be more present at W3C to promote their own work! What Steve Jobs done can finally deserve them in this goal.
In this thoughts I’ve created a petition to ask Adobe to open-source Flash Player http://www.openplayer.net/ please sign and share!
Both combined HTML5 and Flash power could gave a real impulse to have a new web more quickly than everyone think it’s possible with only one or the other technology doing both their way. WhatWG group estimate that HTML5 will not be finished until 2022 http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#When_will_HTML5_be_finished.3F it lets room for some Flash behaviors to be introduced in HTML5 before and probably to help to finished it earlier.
“Just look at Java, it’s been open spec for 15 years, and there still aren’t any compatible alternatives.”
OpenJDK???
That not a alternative that’s just the source code for Java. It’s like saying Firefox (source code) is the alternative to Firefox (binary). It’s all the same implementation.
Umm….
JRockit – http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jrockit/index.html
Apache Harmony – http://harmony.apache.org/
IBM JDK – http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/
Excelsior JET – http://www.excelsior-usa.com/jet.html
J9 – http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/J9
IKVM – http://www.ikvm.net/
Jikes RVM – http://jikesrvm.org/
AVM – http://www.azulsystems.com/technology/avm
And this is not a complete list.
Are any of those compatible with Sun’s Java?
I mean do all the same applets and everything that work with Sun’s Java work with those alternatives?
Edited 2010-05-15 03:28 UTC
As far as I know, the IBM VM and Excelsior JET pass the JVM compatibility test implemented by Sun.
How are they at real world compatibility?
Edited 2010-05-15 05:55 UTC
They’re compatible enough to multi-billion corporations to adopt them.
Edited 2010-05-15 08:51 UTC
The JVMs which pass the tests work 98% of the time, but the original statement remains true. No non-Sun JVM is 100% compatible. I’ve seen many Java apps which specifically state JVM version requirements as “Sun JVM” and cite incompatible implementations as the reason. I have personally experienced the problems with taking a Java app that was developed for Sun JVM and using it on other JVMs. Yes you *can* do it, but there are many gotchas.
For me, all that Flash lacks is –
(1) Autoupdate
Flash releases minor version with all the security and crash fixes and users doesn’t get the update.
(2) Crash dump collector.
Flash should collect the crash dump from the users with user consent, so that they can fix it in next release. As Flash is major cause for crashing many browsers.
Rest are all fine. Flash doesn’t suck. Yes, Flash does software rendering , doesn’t use the GPU as of today. But they are fixing that Flash 10.1 will have hardware accelerator and will reduce the CPU usage. Right now Flash 10.1 is in RC version that means they are very close to final release.
Also, I just want to say something here. Making anything open source will not fix the issue. It might even worsen the product. There should be proper control what goes in and out even in the open source project, like what Linux Kernel has.
If you really want Flash to be good, use Flash 10.1 RC version from http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/ and report all the crash properly to Adobe.
Flash doesn’t suck? What is the internet coming to?
Hint: “It’s slow” was never close to the top of the list of reasons why flash is bad. Being a resource hog is a problem, but that’s not the problem with flash!
My biggest complaint against Flash is the author’s first complaint: There’s ALWAYS a new version, and for some reason, I NEVER have it installed. Newer Flash versions always seem to run slower than older ones, and peg my CPU at 100%.
Adobe needs to STOP throwing in all the new features and concentrate on getting Flash to a stable point where it doesn’t hog my CPU. They need to take Flash back to the way it used to be before it became a bloated mess.
It would take an enormous amount of work to fork Java and improve it to the point that it would be worth using over the standard version.
Open sourcing Flash however could easily result in a dozen incompatible versions. Some guy makes a couple improvements and everyone downloads his version which later leads to incompatibility issues with Adobe’s version and then some other guy comes out with another fork but that one only works with Windows so some other guy has this patch you can download and so on until publishers switch to Silverlight out of frustration.
Why wouldn’t Adobe just apply those patches to Flash proper if they were improvements?
Incompatible forks can happen for all sorts of reasons.
With something like Flash you could have someone who rips out functionality as a way to increase performance. Or someone who adds functionality like an ad skipping button which Adobe wouldn’t want to include.
It’s easy to have a conflict of interest in open source since software can’t be made to please everyone. Forks happen and the small size of Flash and conflicting interest over issues like DRM and ads would easily result in incompatible versions.
I think you overestimate the likelihood of there to being several popular incompatible forks.
Even with conflicts of interest present it still takes a lot of significant improvements (that people care about) to make a fork popular enough to effect the whole platform. Again, why wouldn’t Adobe just incorporate those improvements?
All it would take is for someone to strip down the Flash player so it only plays video.
You would reduce the cpu load since there would be less work for the Flash player but there would be nothing for Adobe to adopt.
Flash will improve with time, 10.1 will be a significant improvement.
Which is a load of nonsense. Adobe could easily provide a Flash certification process where you can’t call it Flash unless it passes the conformance tests. Then on top of that push a campaign to educate consumers to install only ‘Flash certified’ players. There you go, a solution right there and doesn’t feed into the ‘fragmentation’ nonsense that you’re trying to spew.
It has already been done.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK
http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk6/
“OpenJDK 6 is an implementation of the Java SE 6 specification valuing stability, compatibility, and security. Various binaries derived from OpenJDK 6 sources have passed the Java SE 6 Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) suite, including packages for Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 9.04.”
Hardly. The goal of an open source Flash Player would be compatibility, not incompatibility. Success would be measured only by how compatible it was.
If you don’t understand open source, what motivates it, and how it works, why make a comment on it?
What would be the incentive for a developer to write a flash app that only works with a specific, minority version? How useful could these ‘improvements’ really be if they limit the market share to nearly 0? What would be the incentive of the average user to install a different version of flash if there are almost no sites that actually require its features?
Welcome to the standards wars. It’s not about one-upsmanship here, it’s about being holier-than-thou, meaning having a more standard implementation than the other guy. If you look at any market with multiple implementations of a standard you’ll find that the one that tacks closest to the standard is the most popular with developers. The only place where this doesn’t happen is where there’s only one vendor, in which case “standard” is “what the one vendor does” and everybody else will try to mimic that.
I recommend you read up on Open Source forking and why it almost never happens. Most “forks” that you might hear of either merge quickly or result from the project being dead and the “fork” being the only branch being worked on.
“None of those excuses hold water because Sun open sourced Java, and successfully dealt with those very same concerns”
Didn’t Sun run itself into the ground?
Adobe has little reason to open source it.
It has become the defacto standard for the web right now.
It can provide content providers with DRM and other measures.
It makes money through lockin to their platform.
They control the progression of flash.
So just what benefit does Adobe get from open sourcing Flash? Perhaps some users who care about such things might be more pleased. One the other hand, they risk alienating other users and their partners is flash ever forks.
Instead of all those risks, Adobe is probably better off fixing the problem in its software and partnering with OS vendors (Red hat, microsoft, Apple…) to enhance its platform.
That had nothing to do with their open-sourcing Java. The platform and all of its tools were free prior to that, so it’s not like Sun lost a source of revenue. Open-sourcing the platform has if anything ensured Java’s enduring relevance in the past decade.
But for how long can they keep that up when faced with increasingly capable, completely free and open alternatives?
It can keep doing that once it’s open source. It’s not as if all of Java’s encryption APIs suddenly became unusable….
Again, for how much longer?
This argument just doesn’t hold water. No one has anything to gain by forking a platform in an incompatible way, as it would mean that the fork automatically becomes irrelevant due to its lack of support for existing apps.
Those partners would be a lot more likely to “partner” if it meant in the loose, flexible sense of the word; i.e. contributing to open-source code.
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/6623/
I agree that Adobe should open source the Flash player, however I think you failed to make a compelling case for it in your article. Here are the reasons I think open-sourcing Flash is indeed the way to go:
1) Easy distribution with Linux distros. This was also one of the reasons why open-source Java made sense. And it will become more and more relevant as ARM-based devices take over the scene.
2) Broader platform support. There are plenty of niche mobile platforms out there (Linux on non-x86, BeOS, Haiku, Amiga, QNX) that you know Adobe will never support. Open-sourcing the Flash player will mean that someone, somewhere will probably port to every imaginable platform, thus reinforcing the notion of Flash as a true cross-platform app-development and content-delivery tool.
3) Browser integration. If Adobe really wants to maintain their hold over web developers, what could be better than getting the Flash player integrated directly with the browser? Google’s version of Chrome is already slated to do this–what about Chromium, and what about Firefox? If Adobe were to open-source Flash, it would all be possible. Flash would become even more of a “de facto” standard than it already is. Hell, maybe Apple would even be willing to integrate Flash with Safari on the iPhone, once they gained full control over the code….
4) It’s the right thing to do. Adobe can talk all they want about how open-source they are, but it means nothing to be able to develop something in an open manner (i.e. with Flex), when the source for half of the actual *useful* API is still closed, the IDE is closed-source and pay-to-play for all non-students, and the platform that the app runs on (Flash Player and/or AIR) is closed-source. Adobe should open up the full Flash API (which in fact forms the basis for the Flex API), the player, the AIR platform, and the Flash Builder IDE. (They can still offer the Flash Builder Professional version at cost for the people who need it.) Only then can they truly claim to offer an “open source development environment” (like Java), and only then can they hope to win over open-source coders.
Maybe they can live without all this. After all, they are getting by just fine with their large base of (mostly commercial) coders. However, if they really want to see their tools being used to create open-source projects to the same extent as is seen for instance within the Java development community, then they will have to change their ways and open up.
More convincingly perhaps, Flash is beginning to face irrelevance (kind of reminiscent of Java a few years back). If they open source it, they have that much more of a fighting chance of survival for the next decades to come.
How is a 97% install base irrelevance? I also don’t see big publishers like Hulu getting excited about HTML5.
Adobe makes their money from publishing tools, not the actual Flash client. They could build their software around HTML5 if needed.
Never mind the argument about when or if Flash is becoming irrelevant. You agree that the Flash client itself does not provide a source of income. So what speaks against open sourcing it?
A big reason why content producers like Hulu prefer Flash to HTML5 is because it offers content protection.
Open sourcing the Flash client would take away that advantage.
Someone would also add the feature to skip over ads. As I said there are conflicting interests here.
I’m not at all convinced that this is the case. Security technology can still do its job even if the source is open, since it is depending on encryption keys external to the code. The only problem I could foresee is with licensing, but in the worst case scenario the content protection module could be plugged in as a binary blob downloaded on the fly from the Adobe site.
If you’re going to give access to the video processing then you need to give access to unprotected video at some point in the stack. It’s the closed binary that hides the process of decrypting the video and displaying it to the screen. A hacked open source client could make a secure connection and then dump the decrypted video into an avi file. It isn’t like a typical secure connection where you are keeping data from outside parties. You’re also limiting what the client can do with the data.
You could make it a black box process with an open source framework but then you wouldn’t have enough access for open source developers to make improvements. At the most you could make it more portable.
The other problem is that ads could easily be removed by forcing the client to only play the video layer.
[citation needed]
It’s very easy to say that, but harder to demonstrate that it’s true. Do you think something can’t provide DRM if it’s open source?
That’s a general question that doesn’t address specific issues I have raised.
Local DRM amounts to local encryption that the client can only decrypt under certain conditions. Open sourcing the Flash client would allow these conditions to be modified.
You also can’t open source the video processing component without exposing the video. The closed binary is a key part of the protection.
I am getting a bit fed up with this whole story.
First of all, I have not had a flash plugin on my computer since I switched to 64bit Linux back in 2004 (gentoo 2004.0). I have not joined in at the whole youtube hype and everything that came with it. If I want to view some video that is on a blog or something, I can download the flv file and play it in mplayer and that works just fine.
I have loathed browser plugins ever since my first experiences with the internet and netscape. And I think if a browser does not support a technology out of the box then maybe it should not be embedded in a web page.
There is at least 2 other implementations of java. There is ibm’s implementation(Which is quite good) and there is the gcj compiler.
I don’t understand why adobe doesn’t opensource flash. They make money with photoshop not flash player, so what is the problem?
Are they afraid someone will steal their technology?
…Hey Adobe, leave to Nvidia such pathetic excuses 
The thing I hate the most about Flash is floating ad behavior. If they would offer a way to float ads upon mouse click instead of mouseover, I’d not be so pissed off. And no, I won’t use Flash ad blockers for this only issue. I find other Flash ads useful in informing me about things I dunno.
If for you open-sourcing Flash is a concern, there’s now a petition to ask Adobe to open-source the Flash Player source code http://www.openplayer.net/ please sign the petition and share the link!
Thanks for that! I’ve already gone and signed myself!
RichterKuato, I’m please to note that you’re the first person I read to share the same vision of how Flash would have to evolve until it would be open-sourced. I’m completely agree with your three points :
– Start releasing the pieces of Flash they own under 2 licenses: copyleft and commercial.
– Provide the encumbered parts as binary plugs until a substitute is ready.
– Gradually eliminate the need for binary plugs until the whole project is open source.
I really hope that your article will help to share this vision, thanks a lot for writing it!
Edited 2010-05-15 18:35 UTC
I keep hearing how Content Provider keeps taking our rights away (or try to). Much like how they claim that we are only licensing a copy of the movie we BOUGHT at the store … simply isn’t true.
Then there’s the nut case known as RMS. Someone you don’t EVER want to have your kid around.
All in all, both RMS and the content providers have one thing in common .. they are both bat sh!t crazy.
And you are too if you believe in either one of them.
Edited 2010-05-16 17:45 UTC
You should really enlist thbe help of Eric Raymond, he was the one who got Sun to open source java.
Flash is great! Here’s why. (Not for the reason it sounds like.)
Flash is great because I can use “Click2Flash” to block all that damn animated ads on websites. Because I can block things that are obviously ads, this allows me to have a much better web experience.
Once ads are changed to something less easily blocked, my experience will be degraded.
PS: If you don’t want me to block ads on your site, don’t animate them. Simple as that.