This is in response to Ryan Stewart’s post: The Open Web Is Slow.
Thanks for the post Ryan. I agree with much of what you are saying and as a non-Adobe employee, I definitely agree that Adobe does better-than-most commercial companies at contributing and fostering the open source community. In-fact, the Flash community, by and large, is a community that really believes in Open Source, whether it’s for silly experiments, or full blown engines like Tweener or pv3d.
However, I believe it would help the community if there was some sort of post explaining Adobe’s reasons for not open sourcing the Flash Player. I can speculate reasons, but it seems open sourcing it under the right licensing structure would be beneficial for everyone.
At the company I work for, we do a lot of development using Qt by Trolltech. They have a great licensing structure that states the following:
“The main licensing options available are:
* Commercial Licensing. This is the appropriate option if you are creating proprietary applications and you are not prepared to distribute and share the source code of your application.
* Open Source Licensing. This is the appropriate option if you want to share the source code of your application with everyone you distribute it to, and you also want to give them the right to share who uses it.”
Trolltech gets free contributions from the community to their source, and they foster a community that does free advertisement for the company (by the sheer nature of Open Source). Their commercial licensing is not cheap, so the company still makes great money. It’s a win/win for everyone.
Flash has such an extremely creative community that is always pushing Flash to its limits. I believe the tools that would be created if the Flash Player were open source would be incredible. At the same time, I love Adobe’s products and do not want the company to decline financially. But I believe the opposite would happen: even more people would desire to use Flash as the tools for developing it get better and better.
I think the main reason for this, is that if the flash player were open source, then someone could make a slightly modified version of the player.
Then suddenly we would have multiple versions of the player, and developers like us would have the same problems as those who have to deal with multiple browsers.
I agree with you that this could be worked around with the right license, but I still think this is the main reason for Adobe’s descision.
Left by Tony Fendall on April 3rd, 2008
@Tony: Yeah, you could argue the same thing about Qt, but the way the license is setup, you can’t get away with it. You might be able to steal the general algorithms and methodologies and rewrite everything from scratch, but with the fantastic integration of Adobe products, I think that the only people that could really compete with Adobe are already competing. Plus, again, Qt has managed to prevent this through their licensing scheme.
Left by Nate Chatellier on April 3rd, 2008
Wouldn’t open sourcing the flash player make it susceptible to security attacks?
Left by Alan on April 3rd, 2008
@Nate: one thing to keep in mind is that Adobe does not get revenue from Flash Player directly, since it’s free. I do think Adobe has a fair bit to gain by opening the player, but I (as author of the article that started this) am not calling for Adobe to go as far as open sourcing their player. I’m saying that they should release the SWF spec under open terms so that others can make players.
@Tony: Yes, there *could* be multiple SWF player implementations out there. As long as Adobe stays on top of things, though, their implementation would undoubtedly lead the field by a wide margin. And note that, as is typical in open source, Adobe would retain the “Flash” name. You can’t call it Flash unless Adobe says you can. Much like the situation with Java today.
The point is for people to be able to try things out and use their own creativity to push the bounds of what can be done with a SWF.
@Alan: Wouldn’t Firefox being open source make it more susceptible to security attacks?
The more likely scenario is that security flaws will be noticed and patched more quickly.
I think there’s enough open source running in untrusted network environments at this point that one can’t reasonably make the argument that it will be less secure.
Left by Kevin Dangoor on April 4th, 2008