Do I Really Care if The Flash Player is Open Sourced? Not So Much
So wow, who knew a post about open sourcing the Flash Player would get people so riled up? My ZDNet commenters are riled, Ajaxian mentioned it, and I even got a link from Ted Patrick. polyGeek even sent a big lighting bolt my way 
So here’s the thing, does having the Flash Player open sourced make my life better? No. Does it make the developer community any better? No not necessarily. Is me rambling about open source Flash in a blog post going to make anyone’s life better? HELL No. But I learned a lot from Ted Leung about how open source works, and Adobe is becoming a very open company. It’s things like Tamarin, but its also stuff like how open they’re being with Apollo (not to mention contributing to WebKit) and the plans for Flex 3. The great thing about Adobe is how good they are at listening and talking with people.
A lot of people use Ajax partly because it’s based on open standards and the technologies behind it are generally open source. I’m not an Ajax fan, and I think we all know that. I’m always looking for ways to get Ajax developer into the Flex fold, so any conversation that helps that is one I think has value. My post didn’t really do that, but I think it got people talking, which is all it was supposed to do. And hopefully people learned something about open source in the process. The governance issue was something I didn’t understand at all, so I wanted to talk about those issues in the context of Flash Player.
I’m not being baptized into the church of open source, I’m not sharpening my XULRunner skills, I just wanted to throw ideas around and engage some influential people (like Ted, or the guys at RedMonk) about how Flash can be more open and bring in more developers. Open sourcing it is not the answer, just something to add to the conversation.
Oh, and also talking about Open Source Flash always gets a lot of page views. (kidding)
[tags]Flash Player, Open Source[/tags]
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
April 11th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
If it’s any concilation, I say fair shout to you for firstly taking the time out to research and speak to people in the know and better understand something you acknowledged you could know more on. And secondly for openly changing your mind (and kind of back again) on the issue.
People need to be more open to change in this industry (and particularly this community) and not locking themselves into one single way of thinking. Maybe last month keeping Flash player closed was the best idea, maybe next month open is the best idea.
The point I think you’ve raised is that the best action can and will change day to day and it’s not until someone raises the question that change-potential is identified, acknowledged and acted upon or dismissed.
Of late I’ve noticed myself being more frustrated by the “One OS/Tool/Company/Strategy/Whatever to rule them all” attitude and everyone and their dog being so keen to jump on the defensive-offensive by regurgitating things that have been said over and over. We need to be more mindful of what is right today and that it might not be right tomorrow.
I thought it was a great post and obviously brought a lot of ideas to alot of people and triggered a decent reaction. A successful post if ever I saw one! Keep it up and don’t get discouraged by fanboybandwagon negativity (which I know you wont as you’re far more familiar with that reaction than I).
April 11th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Hey Ryan,
Danny is right – regardless of whether folks love or hate the idea of open sourcing the Flash Player, you took the time to present a well thought out, professional opinion. We appreciated it.
Also, keep in mind the article was a success. Again, whether or not folks loved it or hated it, you emoted a huge response and got a lot of people thinking.
Great Job!
April 11th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Just so we’re clear: I didn’t send the lightning bolt. I only noticed it coming up from the direction of Adobe headquarters.
I half-heartedly endorse the idea of opening up the Flash player. If it can be done without forking the player I’m all for it.
April 11th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
It never hurts to sharpen your skills
April 12th, 2007 at 12:08 am
[...] A few weeks back, I had dinner in Seattle with Ryan Stewart and Brian Zug. Over the course of several hours we covered a number of topics, including a crash course in open source software. Yesterday Ryan posted some of what he learned during our conversation, including his conclusions about whether or not open sourcing the Flash Player was a good idea. That post generated a bunch of traffic, so Ryan put up a follow up post on his personal blog. [...]
April 12th, 2007 at 1:20 am
[...] In diversen Blogs wird im Moment diskutiert (hier, hier und hier), ob Adobe den Source Code des Flash Players (der jetzt ja auch als Runtime für Flex und Apollo fungiert) freigeben soll. Diese Diskussion bringt doch nichts. Was die Adaption einer Platform wirklich vorantreibt, sind gute Entwicklungstools, Dokumentation und die sich darum entwickelnde Community. 500 Euro für den FlexBuilder zu nehmen (der im Grunde ja auch “nur” ein Ecllipse Plugin ist) ist eines der Hindernisse die Adobe aus dem Weg räumen muss. Eclipse hat Microsoft und Borland gezwungen Versionen ihrer IDEs kostenfrei zur Verfügung zu stellen. Nie hatten Entwickler so gute und kostengünstige Werkzeuge. Wenn man sich hingegen die Offenlegung der Java Runtime Quellen anschaut, merkt man das das man damit zwar viel Aufmerksamkeit, aber wenig konkrete Ergebnisse erreichen kann. [...]
April 12th, 2007 at 1:34 am
Thanks for chiming in here guys, it may sound cheesy, but it was really cool of you. Danny, I’m sorry Akismet caught yours as spam the first time around.
April 12th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Just to be clear, I think Dan was fibbing a little with that talk about lightning bolts….
“A lot of people use Ajax partly because it’s based on open standards and the technologies behind it are generally open source.”
For whatever it’s worth, I wouldn’t be comfortable saying that sentence myself… the fileformats and protocols may be decided by a committee of best&brightest, and there may be specific implementations of those formats/protocols which are created with sourcecode disclosure and community additions, but mostly HTML/JS work is driven by a few different proprietary implementations of those committee-based formats & protocols. All clientside work is constrained by what other people will actually install on their own machines.
jd