Comments on: Google isn’t Evil. Flash isn’t Dead; Thank god the Open Web doesn’t have a single vendor

By: arpit

arpit — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:18:01 +0000

This is my favorite post on the whole Adobe/Apple/Google thing. I think proprietary platforms often act as the catalyst for open platforms, and occasionally as the proverbial canaries in the coalmines too. Flash has been my meal ticket for the last 5 years or so but I dont consider myself a Flash developer, I consider myself an interactive developer. Whatever lets me get my idea/vision in front of people works for me. Cults of any kind are a turn off.

By: MatTrue

MatTrue — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:34:36 +0000

Lawrence Lessig and the author of this post value “clean” politics more than “messy” free speech. Look at how much “$” was raised last election by both sides. Wall Street actually gave more to Democrats. They bought their bailouts.

That was before this Supreme Court decision. Political speech should have no restrictions. Doesn’t matter if it comes from a newspaper, church, cult, commune, or corporation. Multi-nationals may have a lot of money, but they also have customers and shareholders to please, and hopefully competitors to be better than.

The way to get *clean* politics is to give power back to individuals. Get it out of Washington, out of Wall Street, out of Hollywood, out of Silicon Valley, etc. All that power brokering can only be stopped when WE wise up and become more careful about where our hard earned dollars go.

The less concentrated the political power, the less influence giant corporations have, and just that much harder to get “too big to fail”.

Oh, and I hate flash, because I have a lap-scorching Macbook.

By: Hanto

Hanto — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:17:14 +0000

Psychopathic I think is the term used in many cases, but most should understand where you are coming from. And since there are laws concerning the well-being of society against psychopathic humans, could there not be laws that might hinder the capacity of such organizations ( corporations ) to do harm. I would like to see all ads from such corporations carry a label warning the humans of this world that these organizations have sometime in the past or currently engaged in behavior considered illegal for an individual.

There is far to much lying and spinning of tall tales in the advertising world. And somehow the individual needs just as much advertising spent on giving him/her fair warning about the Truth in Advertising this country claims to follow.

By: cmcx_linux

cmcx_linux — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:10:30 +0000

PS2: As for the open web format world, I have to say that we are in 2010 and I still have problems creating html4 websites to behave the same in all browsers and I have to build variants. Javascript is still slower than flash at rendering content in motion ( on linux.. even with google chrome..) and as for css I still see that on opera the scrollbar does not color the same way as on firefox. It’s 2010 and we still have all this problems. If browser manufacturers couldn’t agree on fully implementing the already existing standards, then I do not think that they will be able to implement and agree on a standard which is not even ready. But this problem does not resume only to the web part. Each company or OSS community have the freedom to adhere to the standard more or less. Take the unix variants for example: We have Linux, Solaris, BSD, MacOsX, IBM AIX, etc.. all of these systems are POSIX compliant ( which is an open standard regarding os behavior), but are they binary compatible? No, Can you compile and run software out of the box from one system to another? No. Even between linux distributions there are issues regarding some source code that works only on one specific distribution, because is dependent on the version of the library that runs on that system. This is the reason why the community could not port Gnash to Android, and we had to wait until google built a version of it, with the blessings from Adobe. This is why it’s still good to have a Dictator over a piece of software. I do not believe that java would be write once run everywhere if Sun did not have quite a tight control over the specs, JDK and JRE. You still have the linux kernel which holds under control the multitude of linux distro, so they can have a common denominator thus making the community’s work when it comes to source code writing much easy and lastly, flash, to run your web content truly the same way on all operating systems in all browsers. From my point of view, since adobe has opened the standards for flash, the company finds itself in the same situation as Sun is. The have a platform both loved and hated by programmers which will not die that easily. As shown, free alternatives have appeared to it and the multitude of support, code and examples for flash out there is uncountable. I won’t deny that the open and free alternatives do not have good support, but from what I felt is still no way near what the flash world has to offer.

By: cmcx_linux

cmcx_linux — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:46:24 +0000

PS: Regarding the compiler part, I think Macromedia ( now Adobe) has built his own variant on top of JVM and use this to compile swf movies, otherwise the heck do I see the point of having JDK inside Adobe Flash’es directory, I mean, come on, everybody complains on Java being slow at drawing that ugly and primitive AWT/Swing GUI, which is not the case for Adobe Flash Editor.

By: cmcx_linux

cmcx_linux — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:36:51 +0000

Hey, regarding flash. Maybe not a lot of people know this, but flash it’s actually an open format..
specs for flv can be found at:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/pdf/video_file_format_spec_v9.pdf
and for the swf format can be found at:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/pdf/swf_file_format_spec_v10.pdf
Regarding the language itself, this is also open, being a variant of ECMA-262 Javascript.
The problem is that the player – flash virtual machine is of closed nature and also the IDE. But if there is enough support and a big enough community, alternatives to these can be built. Take the case of gnash for example, it’s still at it’s beginning but has shown some degree of success. As for IDE there is an alternative to Adobe flash, not as good tough which can be found here:
http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Main_Page
All in all, one can see that flash as a whole is not that evil, and from some points of view resembles the status of javascript ( for some browsers at least), meaning you can build free content in a free environment to run on a closed platform ( how many of you had seen the internals of IE’s or Opera’s javascript Engine) and one has access to the language, the file format, the bytecode and internal data representation.

By: Rick Graham

Rick Graham — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:53:57 +0000

There is a free documentary available on the Internet called “The Corporation” which analyzes the modern corporation from the viewpoint of a person. Corporations claim this status as their right in law. A corporation is a person without a conscience, without morals. By law the sole responsibility of a corporation is to make money for its shareholders.

We have a name for a person like that. A person without conscience or morals that is driven by the sole purpose of gaining money or power. We call those people psychotics.

By: Marc Canter

Marc Canter — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:21:44 +0000

Right on brother. You’ve communicated the challenges and tradeoffs of capitalism versus altruism. These are the issues I’ve been dealing with after enabling and creating the FIRST multimedia player – pre-Flash.

Never in our wildest imagination could we have dreamed of getting the installed base of Flash, yet I think I would have done something differently with it – than the inheritors of our legacy did.

Oh well.

But the days of single vendor lock-in are about to go away.

It’s ALL about multi-vendor. So Twitter better watch out. And Facebook – too!

Our Open Stack of Open Standards keeps expanding – look at the recent Activity Streams standards!

By: Michael Richardson

Michael Richardson — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:43:51 +0000

Where Flash still comes out ahead is in its abillity to deliver a truly consistent (no, not bug/crash free) product, and at the cutting edge. Check out this wonderful presentation of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: http://www.sfmoma.org/projects/artscope/index.html#r=64 (created by Stamen Design). This is Flash: truly software delivered via the browser that is incomparably rich. You cannot do this in JS (with any of its current graphic libraries, including Processing) or HTML5. The support of complex, vector-based graphics, motion, and all the rest make Flash YEARS ahead of HTML5. Having YouTube etc move to a new video format in HTML5 will indeed mean the death of Flash — as required for watching video on YouTube etc. — but Flash (and its IDEs) is very much alive.

By: Joe Walker

Joe Walker — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:13:24 +0000

The problem is ‘dead’ is such an overloaded word.

- dead as a Norwegian Blue
- dead as Elvis
- dead as Duke Nukem Forever
- dead the Amiga
- dead as Cobol
- dead as Newsprint
- dead as MS Office

You can run a smooth spectrum from “dead and pushing up daisies”, to “dead, but only if you believe everything you hear on the Gilmor Gang”.

I personally think that the open web doesn’t need flash as a competitor. There is enough internal competition right now, and I don’t see that going away in a short time.

Joe.