MaDFlash - Flash on Mobile and Devices

Should Adobe open source Flash Player right now?

Posted on April 13th, 2007 by admin.
Categories: Flash Lite, Adobe.

Recently one of the writers at ZDNet posted an opinion piece on whether the Flash Player should be open sourced. This article riled up a lot of people at Adobe including Ted Patrick, technical evangelist at Adobe. Ted Patrick’s response blasts the notion that Flash Player development happens in a vacuum, and gives great examples of how the Flash Player has evolved with the help of developers outside of Adobe. It’s not an open source community, but it’s certainly not a completely closed development process either.

I agree very much with Ted in that regard. My own experiences with Adobe have shown me that the Adobe developers are very open to suggestions, constructive criticism, and new ideas. They very proactively seek qualified beta and alpha users for their products and they value customer input. You don’t often hear about it because Adobe development is kept under wraps, but a lot of people outside of Adobe get early access to products to provide testing and dev help.

The issue of an open sourced flash player is particularly sensitive in the mobile arena where many companies are trying to minimize risk and cost by using open source technologies. I personally don’t buy into that logic completely, use the technology that is best for your needs. Open sourced code is great and I think that in an ideal world all platforms would be open. But today’s reality is that open source tools are a bonus, not a requisite, when it comes to picking the right platform for your business.

However, as a proponent of Open Source I can’t deny that I feel that if the Flash Player were open we would probably see much more penetration in the mobile arena, and more developer acceptance in general. But that’s not to say that Adobe hasn’t already contributed to the open source effort. As Ted says:

I do agree with Ryan that some aspects of the player should be open source, then again some aspects already are. We donated the brain of Flash Player to Mozilla as open source in the Tamarin project. The JIT ECMA4 runtime will power Javascript in FireFox and all enhancements will be shared among the OS participants.

In the future I see the Flash Player getting more and more open, but for now we’re not going to see a completely open player and I don’t think we need to.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, open source, Flash

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