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I’m complaining that they repeatedly paper over or try to distract from the fact that the core of their technology offering — the Flash Player — is completely proprietary. Beyond even the source code, the specification is controlled in a very restrictive way, as is obvious from anyone reading the license. Similarly, AIR has a ton of open source technology in it, but, well, you can read the license. I’m asking for them to be forthright about the closed nature of the platform, and nothing else. If Flash is too big of an investment to open, then they should say so proudly, not try to hide behind the Tamarin release and cloud the issue with reference to the Flex tools and so on.

The only significant open source project I’ve been involved in founding and working on for a decade was Mozilla, so you will need to go elsewhere for your Yu-gi-oh card tracking needs, unless you want to build a XUL application to do so, or maybe a web application.

(Moderation is on for first-time posters, but you see all the comments and trackbacks that have been submitted, except for the two from splogs that just republish articles blindly for adsense revenue. I suppress those as a matter of course.)

Mike P: I recognize and applaud what Adobe’s done with open source, as I’ve said elsewhere to press, conference-goers, and developers. It’s clear that you know how to make something open if you want to, and equally clear that Adobe understands that being proprietary is a strike against Flash, which is why James was answering the “100% Proprietary” misconception, albeit in large part by referring to non-Flash open source efforts by Adobe. Skylarov was indeed some time ago, but there have been references in the last year to suing people who are deigning to reverse-engineer Flash formats, from people who I would have hoped would know better, so I’m afraid I don’t share your optimism that such attitudes are entirely behind us.

Abdul: with the Flash source people would be able to port to other platforms, excerpt subsets for different application domains (like game development, for example, which is where the gameswf work was targeted), build better tools, understand strange behaviour exhibited by their own Flash apps, debug interactions with other pieces of software (like Firefox), improve the Flash platform itself, and more.

So tell me – what have YOU donated to the open source community? I’d ask you to send me the source code to your latest projects, but I don’t need a Yu-gi-oh card tracker.

I can think of one solid use-case, which is to port it to various platforms not supported by Adobe.

Everything takes time and I am sure, when it would be right Adobe might open the Flash Player also. I am very positive about their approach since they have acquired Macromedia. Flex SDK is open, AMF is going open, BalzeDS is open and surely other things would also go open…

You mentioned one particular case “Arrest”, AMFPHP has been there for last three-four years and Macromedia has been pretty ok. Even Adobe is cool with it, I have seen Adobe guys talking about it, allowing other developers to use it and write articles about AMFPHP for Adobe devnet?

I think, Adobe is a company that seriously listens community feedback/requests. They have been doing most of things right so far and I am optimistic, they would do it right…

Let’s not be religious (FOSS) and ask for opening up everything for that sake… Rather let’s spend our energy giving right use-cases to Adobe or any such company so that they start feeling “yeah it makes sense to open up X thing”…

I am neither Adobe employee nor biased towards one particular technology, it pisses me off when people (slashdot or like that) need a reason like this…

Thanks

-abdul

Thanks for your feedback on the InfoQ article. I’ll try to be more careful with my wording on this topic.

-James