Steve Jobs, Flash Myth no.1 – Flash is not open

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Its strange to hear Steve Jobs profess concern about a open web when everything else his company does is so militantly closed. This is the company that first put DRM into music, that won’t let your change your own battery, will tie to you to one phone carrier and will only let you install software from their store.

OK, but we are talking about the open web, not Apple’s OS…

People tend to associate Flash content with two things; video and games. Fortunately Jobs provides alternatives for both, for video he cites the H.264 codec. Which is fine, but isn’t H.264 a licensed, closed technology? so much so that the Firefox developers want nothing to do with it. Apple are also the company that have their own propriety, closed video plugin – quicktime, something Jobs appears to have forgotten all about.

As for games, Jobs mentions the 50,000 games in the App store, you know the same marketplace where you have to buy a Mac, pay a yearly license fee and pray Apple deems it worthy and does not pull it for some arbitrary reason. Ironically, a lot of those App store games are Flash ports, which otherwise could have been universally viewable on nearly every device with a internet connection.

Flash is not closed as you might think

The ActionScript 3 runtime (Tamarin) was open sourced, as was RTMP. The SWF file format has had its specification published so anyone can build a tool to output SWFs. AS3 is based on EMCAScript, XML parsing uses E4X – both open standards. The Flash IDE is easily extendible and the Flex SDK is 100% open source. Using Flex Builder, built on top of the open source Eclipse engine you can create Flash content created with open sourced tools. The plugin itself can never be 100% open sourced as it relies on licensed technologies like H.264 (Steve’s replacement to Flash video). However, as the xbox & PS3 have demonstrated its open enough to allow 3rd party companies to develop their own version of the plug-in.

There is also a huge community of Flash developers who for many years have been sharing code and helping each other out. The are many open sourced code projects (tween engines, utility classes etc ). I’m not saying that Flash is open is the strictest sense, but its not a closed as Jobs is making out and its a hell of a lot more open than the App store alternative.

A truly open web is not the preserve of one company

Any sensible vision of a open web, inludes the option to download applications made by anyone and install any plugin you want. Jobs appears to be heralding HTML5 as an exciting replacement to the “outdated”, “pc era” Flash, but really he knows its in such early development that for now its a non-starter. What he is actually saying to developers is please use our closed, tightly controlled App ecosystem so we can make money either by taking a cut of the sales price or through our iAd advertising platform.

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COMMENTS
The discussion so far...
AlX
4 months ago

I completely don’t agree with this post. I’m sorry, but it sounds like a “wine”: “it’s you are bad, not me! /cry”.

I’m a Flash Developer with 10 years of commercial xp, i’m in business since Macromedia Flash 5, and I know a lot about Flash. Adobe is ruining the Flash by adding tons of bugs and glitches to the platform, while new verions of Flash related products are advertised as “better, more powerful, stable and a lot of finest marketing shit”. Adobe don’t FIX and IMPROVE what they already have, they add new features(glitches) over the old unfixed stuff. Even flash team admits that Flash sux hard these days. I’m already moving towards something different, not sure what exactly. But I can tell for sure, if adobe will keep it’s greed on the prio – it’ll be the end of Flash.

Flash is really slow(compared to Java or Python), no GPU acceleration, no good working text handling, it requires too much of CPU power to perform, it does not work in some cases when it must work. All of that stuff is spammed on the blogs over the internet – take a dig, it won’t be hard to find the negative. All of that stuff is reported to Adobe, and ignored, because Adobe needs sales, every 18 months. And that’s what they concerned of.

I don’t care whether Steve Jobs right or wrong, I just don’t want to have some laggy and shitty stuff in my iPhone.

If Firefox don’t want to use H.264 – it’s normal to make this decision, and Apple does the same – they pick what they think right for their stuff, and that brought Apple to the point where they are now. Even Adobe is jealous about it so that they decided to be a part of with with they shit stuff.

I’d do the same – i’d filter everything that i think is BAD for my stuff, and I don’t and should not care about what others think.

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Gareth
4 months ago

I think your view of Flash is stuck with Flash 5. Anyway if you think Flash performance is bad on the mobile platform, html5 is even worse: http://vimeo.com/10553088

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AlX
4 months ago

Nope, I don’t thinks it performs bad on mobile devices, i think it performs bad in general. Compared to Unity3D for example. And I do not hate idea of Flash running on the Mobiles, I just don’t want Flash to spread. I want it fixed and then evolved to fulfill the modern demands of the modern web (and of course not to suck at it).

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stevejobsisatool
4 months ago

steve lost me when he starting talking about open standards with a straight face.

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