21–26 of 26 posts
What almost everyone fails to realize is that Flash is already as open as it possibly can be. The SWF file specification and the player virtual machine are open and completely described here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/ The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses, not Adobe's stubbornness. Adobe pays a lot of money to license codecs that are closed (like h.264…
What almost everyone fails to realize is that Flash is already as open as it possibly can be. The SWF file specification and the player virtual machine are open and completely described here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/ The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses, not Adobe's stubbornness. Adobe pays a lot of money to license codecs that are closed (like h.264…
Sure they specified the container format, bytecodes, and data structures — but everybody had figured that part out a long time ago because it's obvious and easy to capitalize on by developing an extractor. The runtime APIs are incredibly hard to reverse-engineer, comprise the vast bulk of the Flash implementation, and are the entire reason for the plugin's instability.
It's like saying that Windows is a completely open platform (save for the patents) just because Microsoft publishes a stable userland ABI and fairly comprehensive API documentation for downstream developers.
Gnash is no further along than ReactOS.
What almost everyone fails to realize is that Flash is already as open as it possibly can be. The SWF file specification and the player virtual machine are open and completely described here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/ The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses, not Adobe's stubbornness. Adobe pays a lot of money to license codecs that are closed (like h.264…
The codec excuse is kind of bogus. Chromium itself comes with a separate package that contain patented codecs. Adobe could easily break down the code into separate parts, the whole open source part and a small codec package containing the patented parts. Of course it should also offer one full package for general use like Google does with Chrome Vs Chromium+ffmpeg-nonfree-codecs.
Adobe Uses DMCA On Protocol It Promised To Open http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/22/1254246
How do Gnash developers work with the Adobe/Macromedia EULA? http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula
Read this two links and come back to discuss about flash openness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is plenty of time for them to improve this year. But since it's taken 3 years to get into beta, I'm not very confident that rapid improvement will be happening.
Right, but that's cause Adobe sucks at building software. But they do have the ability to deploy updates that actually reach consumers in a timely fashion, massively faster than any W3 spec or browser vendor can even dream of pushing something through. Everything Adobe, Microsoft, Unity etc push to their own platforms between HTML5 and HTML6 is stuff that HTML5 doesn't have and can't include until the next release be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is plenty of time for them to improve this year. But since it's taken 3 years to get into beta, I'm not very confident that rapid improvement will be happening.
Right, but that's cause Adobe sucks at building software. But they do have the ability to deploy updates that actually reach consumers in a timely fashion, massively faster than any W3 spec or browser vendor can even dream of pushing something through. Everything Adobe, Microsoft, Unity etc push to their own platforms between HTML5 and HTML6 is stuff that HTML5 doesn't have and can't include until the next release be…
Adobe Flash can push upgrades to everyone because they have 98% penetration and a built in update system. New versions are ubiquitous within a year.
Silverlight and Unity can only push updates to people who have them installed. This means they basically face the same issue as browsers who can put things into the hands of their users (1/3 of users for Mozilla, 1/2 if all the browsers but IE support it).