<story><title>Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome</title><url>http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/adobe-and-google-partnering-for-flash-player-on-linux.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>radarsat1</author><text>You know, it&apos;s strange that Adobe hasn&apos;t considered, at this point in time, open-sourcing the Flash player.  Please, hear me out, because I don&apos;t just mean this as an HH (Hopeful Hacker), but also as a well-thought-out IBD (Intelligent Business Decision):&lt;p&gt;Flash has obviously been very beneficial to them in the long run. It has given them the only remaining well-controlled proprietary piece of the web.  This helps them sell their IDE, and more importantly, gets their brand out there.&lt;p&gt;Now, I&apos;d argue that these goals have now been &lt;i&gt;accomplished&lt;/i&gt;.  Adobe is well-entrenched in web history, and everyone knows what Flash is.  However, the relevance of Flash is clearly declining, due to HTML5, and stigma and disgruntlement is increasing.  This means they will get less and less sales of their IDE and their name will fizzle out.&lt;p&gt;Imagine for a second that they open sourced the Flash player.  Just the player.  Suddenly it would no longer carry such a stigma with Linux, it would be easy to include in distros, developers would contribute fixes and make it more efficient on hard-to-support systems.  It would literally stretch out its life-time as a product, and &lt;i&gt;keep&lt;/i&gt; Adobe&apos;s name on the web.&lt;p&gt;I argue that Flash has played out its role for Adobe, and if they open source it &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt; it could only benefit them.  I did not think this was true in the past, and I think it will not be true in 5 to 10 years when HTML5 has surpassed Flash adoption in the most important venues.  However, right &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt; I think it would benefit them immensely.&lt;p&gt;There also seems to be a sentiment from some of the comments here that they are losing interest in maintaining Flash, so opening it to the community would seem to make some sense.  If the &quot;standard&quot; ends up evolving in any way, they&apos;d always have a head-start in their IDE support, since it will easily remain ahead of the curve.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>windsurfer</author><text>There are over 70 patents and licensed libraries in Flash. It would basically be impossible to get those companies to agree to open source and give away all their IP. For a while, Adobe was paying over a dollar per Android Flash install because some of their licenses only applied to desktop.&lt;p&gt;So one might say they should open source the core of Flash, the JIT compiler and virtual machine, and not the parts that are licensed. And you&apos;re right, that would be the correct move! They did that in 2006: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28software%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28software%29&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;They also open sourced the Flex SDK: &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;What Adobe needs is a completely new product that is available to consumers for free, has it&apos;s source code public and free from patents. This way, Adobe tools can still be sold and used to develop, while the player is ubiquitous and as widely spread as possible. And that&apos;s what they&apos;re trying to do with HTML5: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.adobe.com/solutions/html5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.adobe.com/solutions/html5.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Adobe&apos;s communication to developers is bad. No one knows about any this. Technology isn&apos;t their problem, marketing is.</text></comment>
<story><title>Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome</title><url>http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/adobe-and-google-partnering-for-flash-player-on-linux.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>radarsat1</author><text>You know, it&apos;s strange that Adobe hasn&apos;t considered, at this point in time, open-sourcing the Flash player.  Please, hear me out, because I don&apos;t just mean this as an HH (Hopeful Hacker), but also as a well-thought-out IBD (Intelligent Business Decision):&lt;p&gt;Flash has obviously been very beneficial to them in the long run. It has given them the only remaining well-controlled proprietary piece of the web.  This helps them sell their IDE, and more importantly, gets their brand out there.&lt;p&gt;Now, I&apos;d argue that these goals have now been &lt;i&gt;accomplished&lt;/i&gt;.  Adobe is well-entrenched in web history, and everyone knows what Flash is.  However, the relevance of Flash is clearly declining, due to HTML5, and stigma and disgruntlement is increasing.  This means they will get less and less sales of their IDE and their name will fizzle out.&lt;p&gt;Imagine for a second that they open sourced the Flash player.  Just the player.  Suddenly it would no longer carry such a stigma with Linux, it would be easy to include in distros, developers would contribute fixes and make it more efficient on hard-to-support systems.  It would literally stretch out its life-time as a product, and &lt;i&gt;keep&lt;/i&gt; Adobe&apos;s name on the web.&lt;p&gt;I argue that Flash has played out its role for Adobe, and if they open source it &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt; it could only benefit them.  I did not think this was true in the past, and I think it will not be true in 5 to 10 years when HTML5 has surpassed Flash adoption in the most important venues.  However, right &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt; I think it would benefit them immensely.&lt;p&gt;There also seems to be a sentiment from some of the comments here that they are losing interest in maintaining Flash, so opening it to the community would seem to make some sense.  If the &quot;standard&quot; ends up evolving in any way, they&apos;d always have a head-start in their IDE support, since it will easily remain ahead of the curve.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>9999</author><text>I&apos;ve been wondering why they haven&apos;t done this for a very, very long time.  The player itself has not been a source of revenue for Adobe for quite some time (they used to license Flash Lite to handset manufacturers and made money off of that), instead they make all their money by selling tools to make content for that runtime.  I&apos;m hoping someone from Adobe is reading this, because I&apos;ve never really heard a rational business reason for why the Player is not open source.&lt;p&gt;So here are my questions for Adobe:&lt;p&gt;Is there still income from Flash Player licensing? If not, how does keeping the Player closed source help your business interests?&lt;p&gt;Is it the client side DRM you have in place in the Player that&apos;s stopping you from making it open source?&lt;p&gt;Do you not have the resources to communicate with the community that would develop around an open sourced player (knowing that you would have spend some time to justify many things that exist in the codebase to maintain backwards compatibility)?&lt;p&gt;Are you concerned that a rival would clone some of the technology you developed and implement it in their proprietary player (e.g. MS, but they already gave up on Silverlight)?&lt;p&gt;Would the sudden influx of new security patches as vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed potentially compromise the performance of the Player?&lt;p&gt;Are you worried that individuals with malicious intent will find new vulnerabilities and exploit them?&lt;p&gt;What are your  other concerns that are preventing you from open sourcing the Flash Player?</text></comment>