You know, it's strange that Adobe hasn't considered, at this point in time, open-sourcing the Flash player. Please, hear me out, because I don't just mean this as an HH (Hopeful Hacker), but also as a well-thought-out IBD (Intelligent Business Decision):
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.
Now, I'd argue that these goals have now been accomplished. 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.
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 keep Adobe's name on the web.
I argue that Flash has played out its role for Adobe, and if they open source it now 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 now I think it would benefit them immensely.
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 "standard" ends up evolving in any way, they'd always have a head-start in their IDE support, since it will easily remain ahead of the curve.
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.
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're right, that would be the correct move! They did that in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28software%29
What Adobe needs is a completely new product that is available to consumers for free, has it'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's what they're trying to do with HTML5: http://www.adobe.com/solutions/html5.html
Adobe's communication to developers is bad. No one knows about any this. Technology isn't their problem, marketing is.
Indeed, this is long overdue and I've been making this argument for years. Adobe has already lost a lot by keeping Flash Player closed and they only stand to lose more and more. This decision, for instance, will only promote HTML 5 adoption in lieu of Flash farther and farther. Adobe can still matter if they open-source Flash Player right now, but as you noted, the sweet spot is closing rapidly.
The fact of the matter is that if Flash had opened itself up earlier, there wouldn't even be an HTML 5 Canvas/WebGL as we know it, people just would have used and extended Flash and Adobe would still be making bank on their commercial IDE for the environment. Now Adobe's dominance is threatened and Flash is universally despised.
Adobe is obviously terrible at maintaining the runtime so I think the only logical explanation for their lack of OSS Flash Player is that they have some very prehistoric business guys somewhere along the way that don't understand open-source at all and choke this off in terror every time it gets mentioned.
I've been wondering why they haven'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'm hoping someone from Adobe is reading this, because I've never really heard a rational business reason for why the Player is not open source.
So here are my questions for Adobe:
Is there still income from Flash Player licensing? If not, how does keeping the Player closed source help your business interests?
Is it the client side DRM you have in place in the Player that's stopping you from making it open source?
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)?
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)?
Would the sudden influx of new security patches as vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed potentially compromise the performance of the Player?
Are you worried that individuals with malicious intent will find new vulnerabilities and exploit them?
What are your other concerns that are preventing you from open sourcing the Flash Player?
That's a rather naive way of looking at it. The name - Flash Player - is deceptive. Player is what users see and what it appears to be doing, but in reality it is much more than that. It is a content delivery system, and the Player is an essential part of it that is expected to play by the rules - DRM, collaborative p2p delivery, licensing, etc. 10% (maybe) of the player is about playback, the rest is what users don't really see, but what is of a huge value to Adobe. Guess what will be stripped off the second the player open sourced? Why would Adobe want that.
I agree they would probably benefit from open sourcing it. However I don't think they can. In order to "fully open source" it, they would have to include an open source H264/mp4 decoder. Which would probably not be allowed by everyone who owns H264. Alas.
Google has a nasty habit of developing some technology in a dark room, then dropping it on the web community and being confused when no one is that interested (Dart is the other big example). It makes me wonder if they really want these projects to be cross-platform successful or not.
If you read the responses from Chrome engineers on that thread you'll see why a new API was necessary. The requirements and guarantees of your API fundamentally change when you move it out of process for sandboxing and stability. Naive approaches lead to awful performance, deadlocks, or the need to poke massive holes in your security architecture. After a few engineering years of trying to make NPAPI work, it became clear that the result was so different and banned so much of NPAPI that a clean break was the only correct approach.
I can't make much sense of this. Adobe declared Flash dead. Apple declared Flash dead. Google declared Flash dead in Chrome for Android.
Now, they're going to continue working on Flash, but only on a new API that is implemented only in a single browser in Linux (and from statements from Apple and Mozilla, will stay that way), but keeping it compatible with the old NPAPI on Windows?
What I don't even....
Edit: Could it be that Google is planning to release (or has released) some Linux-based appliance where Flash support is a must?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like other browsers are free to implement the "pepper" API as well. It seems as though they are not saying "we're only supporting Chrome". They are saying "Chrome is the only browser that has implemented Pepper so far, and we're only supporting Pepper on Linux".
Except that other browser users won't be able to acquire Flash Player without installing Chrome:
the Flash Player browser plugin for Linux will only be available via the “Pepper” API as part of the Google Chrome browser distribution and will no longer be available as a direct download from Adobe
If the Adobe blog post is correct and the pepper plugin is only distributed with Chrome and isn't open source and part of Chromium then how is another browser going to support it? They'd have to tell you to install Chrome and then open the plugin from within Chrome's installed directory. Pretty ugly solution.
If it's open source and part of Chromium then they can at least take the source out and ship their own, assuming the licensing allows for that and is compatible with their license.
All in all, this sounds like a pretty complex scenario for non-Chrome browser.
If I understand things correctly, there are actually two things going on:
1) Adobe is effectively stopping work on Flash for Linux on their end; it's just not worth it to them.
2) Google is going to support Flash for Linux for Chrome specifically. They can do this because they have access to Flash source and because the Pepper version of the plug-in is much more cross-platform than the NPAPI version, so the support effort is not too great. Given that they already ship a modified Flash, not the stock one, it's not that big a difference from what they're already doing.
So I think you're wrong; even if other browsers implemented the Pepper API, they would also need source licenses from Adobe or would be dependent on Google to get the Flash plug-in.
I get the feeling this isn't going to be that much of a problem. I've not got the flash plugin installed in Firefox and I'm not finding any great hardship these days.
Perhaps it'll kill Flash a bit quicker considering the amount of Kiosks and Internet cafes running Firefox+Flash on Linux.
I think Adobe is nuts to be so hostile to its Linux users. Surely it can't be that expensive to continue developing the old plugin? The thing Flash had going for it was its ubiquity: it worked on all (desktop) browser. Now that that's gone, this will be another good reason not to have new projects depend on Flash.
Yeah, most Linux users either have Flash enabled for the family and hate it or they don't install it. This is a tiny market. Nobody else will care. Linux users already didn't care. Nothing to see here.
I think it's safe to assume they've already killed it. Web developers can no longer make a reasonable assumption that their users will have flash, therefore flash is no longer a useful general purpose tool. It'll stick around for a long time yet due to enterprise and other lazy programmers, but for wide-audience web content flash is dead.
In effect they are. No android support, now nothing except Chrome support on Linux. I'd assume that if my theory is true, Mac OS X will take a similar route(why it didn't happen first is beyond me) before Windows finally meets a similarly gimped fate.
F* Adobe: just kill Flash already, for good. The world (wide web) will be a better place.
I feel absolutely no love for Adobe. Flash was a great technology and Macromedia was a dream company (at least for 14-year old me). They ruined Flash and other Macromedia inventions after taking over.
I truly wish Adobe dies alongside Flash. And Oracle also.
Wow. I remember waiting for flash to come to 64 bit Linux systems...
Perhaps Adobe has to continue supporting Chrome to support Googles Chromebooks.
In a perfect world, we would have open standards and would never need to rely on a company. Hopefully flash will die quickly (I wish I had a dollar for everytime I have heard this).
Apple and Mozilla have already stated that Pepper is entirely redundant with ongoing standardization efforts and even counterproductive to them. So why is Google pushing it? Answer for yourself.
Or do plugins like flash have the choice between native client and just using a shared library as they did and Pepper also supports that?
In the first case it would basically mean that flash would run sandboxed (and maybe on every system supported by Pepper, so once ARM support is added it could run there as well again). But probably with some speed-hit (~5% according to the documentation)
We use Pepper to sandbox some fully native plugins, where NaCl is not yet a good option due to things like codebase incompatibilities and startup performance. Two examples of this are the native PDF reader (on all platforms) and Flash on Chrome OS.
NaCL would probably have been mentioned if it was involved. I think Chrome can still do less fine-grained, OS-assisted sandboxing, and Flash on Pepper is cooperating with that.
> Shumway is an HTML5 technology experiment that explores building a faithful and efficient renderer for the SWF file format without native code assistance.
> Shumway is community-driven and supported by Mozilla. Our goal is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering SWFs. Integration with Firefox is a possibility if the experiment proves successful.
Why is there so much noise over this? How many times does Flash have to die? Yes, the Flash plugin will be with us for another decade, but shouldn't most of us have moved on? I uninstalled Flash on my two Macs in December. I'm doing fine so far. Sometimes, I need to switch over to Chrome for video, but so far I'm not missing it.
I have relatives on Linux and this will complicate things for me. Basically I have to install Chrome and explain why videos and other stuff work only on Chrome. However, it is the way I prefer it by now anyway: use a Firefox without Flash for daily browsing and Chrome for Flash things.
Don't underestimate how complicated it might be to explain this to "noobs", though.
I think it's reasonable to assume that Adobe wants to kill Flash on GNU/Linux, but can't yet do it for Chrome due to some engagement with Google. If this is really their intent, they are going to have much more trouble justifying a kill operation on other platforms.
So, Google agreed to make Flash on Linux available only via Chrome? Damn...
But, if major Linux browsers implement Pepper API, on the other hand it will mean that we (the users) won't have to bother installing (deb/rpm/etc) packages every now or then. Maybe it will turn out better.
This comes at a fine time--I've not been using flash at all. The only site that I regularly used flash for in the past was YouTube, and then only for some videos (the ones with ads). The open source Gnash plugin can play YouTube videos that require flash (it's useless for almost everything else--it can't even play YouTube's ads :P). All the videos that work with HTML5 are better that way. (In a pinch, Gnash would work there too.)
So really, the only things I'm missing are flash games I don't play and ads I don't watch. (Some flash games actually sort of work, but it's not dependable.)
To my fellow developers, please don't develop anything else for Flash. Thanks! (Within the next year Google will have you go full screen in GTK inside Chrome/Debian ... then that's your desktop ... Adobe is hedging this decent bet .... BARF!)
The one thing where Flash is still apparently unavoidable is something like tinychat.com (or chatroulette) which does web-based videoconferencing. The last time I checked, it isn't possible to replicate that without Flash.
WebRTC <http://www.webrtc.org/>; development is ongoing between Google, Mozilla, and Opera. You can try it out in the latest Chrome canary/dev channel.
Good riddance. Flash has never been anything but trouble for Linux. It consumes huge amount of power on Linux and they are not inclined to fix it. Hopefully we will see better HTML5 support in future.
I've been living flash-free for about 6 months, now that youtube autoloads html5 video the only thing pissing me off on a regular basis are the charts on Google Finance and Yahoo Finance.
[+] [-] radarsat1|14 years ago|reply
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.
Now, I'd argue that these goals have now been accomplished. 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.
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 keep Adobe's name on the web.
I argue that Flash has played out its role for Adobe, and if they open source it now 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 now I think it would benefit them immensely.
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 "standard" ends up evolving in any way, they'd always have a head-start in their IDE support, since it will easily remain ahead of the curve.
[+] [-] windsurfer|14 years ago|reply
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're right, that would be the correct move! They did that in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28software%29
They also open sourced the Flex SDK: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK
What Adobe needs is a completely new product that is available to consumers for free, has it'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's what they're trying to do with HTML5: http://www.adobe.com/solutions/html5.html
Adobe's communication to developers is bad. No one knows about any this. Technology isn't their problem, marketing is.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|14 years ago|reply
The fact of the matter is that if Flash had opened itself up earlier, there wouldn't even be an HTML 5 Canvas/WebGL as we know it, people just would have used and extended Flash and Adobe would still be making bank on their commercial IDE for the environment. Now Adobe's dominance is threatened and Flash is universally despised.
Adobe is obviously terrible at maintaining the runtime so I think the only logical explanation for their lack of OSS Flash Player is that they have some very prehistoric business guys somewhere along the way that don't understand open-source at all and choke this off in terror every time it gets mentioned.
[+] [-] 9999|14 years ago|reply
So here are my questions for Adobe:
Is there still income from Flash Player licensing? If not, how does keeping the Player closed source help your business interests?
Is it the client side DRM you have in place in the Player that's stopping you from making it open source?
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)?
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)?
Would the sudden influx of new security patches as vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed potentially compromise the performance of the Player?
Are you worried that individuals with malicious intent will find new vulnerabilities and exploit them?
What are your other concerns that are preventing you from open sourcing the Flash Player?
[+] [-] eps|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radarsat1|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kijin|14 years ago|reply
Sounds like what Oracle did with OpenOffice.org. Dumping it on the Apache Foundation and all that.
[+] [-] sebastianavina|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ootachi|14 years ago|reply
The thread (which continues into May) goes over pretty clearly why they felt Pepper was a bad idea.
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinschuh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcp|14 years ago|reply
Now, they're going to continue working on Flash, but only on a new API that is implemented only in a single browser in Linux (and from statements from Apple and Mozilla, will stay that way), but keeping it compatible with the old NPAPI on Windows?
What I don't even....
Edit: Could it be that Google is planning to release (or has released) some Linux-based appliance where Flash support is a must?
[+] [-] k33n|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dchest|14 years ago|reply
the Flash Player browser plugin for Linux will only be available via the “Pepper” API as part of the Google Chrome browser distribution and will no longer be available as a direct download from Adobe
[+] [-] cmsj|14 years ago|reply
If the Adobe blog post is correct and the pepper plugin is only distributed with Chrome and isn't open source and part of Chromium then how is another browser going to support it? They'd have to tell you to install Chrome and then open the plugin from within Chrome's installed directory. Pretty ugly solution. If it's open source and part of Chromium then they can at least take the source out and ship their own, assuming the licensing allows for that and is compatible with their license.
All in all, this sounds like a pretty complex scenario for non-Chrome browser.
[+] [-] bzbarsky|14 years ago|reply
1) Adobe is effectively stopping work on Flash for Linux on their end; it's just not worth it to them. 2) Google is going to support Flash for Linux for Chrome specifically. They can do this because they have access to Flash source and because the Pepper version of the plug-in is much more cross-platform than the NPAPI version, so the support effort is not too great. Given that they already ship a modified Flash, not the stock one, it's not that big a difference from what they're already doing.
So I think you're wrong; even if other browsers implemented the Pepper API, they would also need source licenses from Adobe or would be dependent on Google to get the Flash plug-in.
[+] [-] bwarp|14 years ago|reply
Perhaps it'll kill Flash a bit quicker considering the amount of Kiosks and Internet cafes running Firefox+Flash on Linux.
[+] [-] raphinou|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loevborg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecaron|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gexla|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZenPsycho|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slowpoke|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shank|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pooriaazimi|14 years ago|reply
F* Adobe: just kill Flash already, for good. The world (wide web) will be a better place.
I feel absolutely no love for Adobe. Flash was a great technology and Macromedia was a dream company (at least for 14-year old me). They ruined Flash and other Macromedia inventions after taking over.
I truly wish Adobe dies alongside Flash. And Oracle also.
[+] [-] yabai|14 years ago|reply
Perhaps Adobe has to continue supporting Chrome to support Googles Chromebooks.
In a perfect world, we would have open standards and would never need to rely on a company. Hopefully flash will die quickly (I wish I had a dollar for everytime I have heard this).
[+] [-] enkrs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coffeeaddicted|14 years ago|reply
Or do plugins like flash have the choice between native client and just using a shared library as they did and Pepper also supports that?
In the first case it would basically mean that flash would run sandboxed (and maybe on every system supported by Pepper, so once ARM support is added it could run there as well again). But probably with some speed-hit (~5% according to the documentation)
[+] [-] justinschuh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] obtu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulrouget|14 years ago|reply
> Shumway is an HTML5 technology experiment that explores building a faithful and efficient renderer for the SWF file format without native code assistance.
> Shumway is community-driven and supported by Mozilla. Our goal is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering SWFs. Integration with Firefox is a possibility if the experiment proves successful.
[+] [-] melling|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tichy|14 years ago|reply
Don't underestimate how complicated it might be to explain this to "noobs", though.
[+] [-] nakkiel|14 years ago|reply
I forsee a slow and painful death for Flash.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moondowner|14 years ago|reply
But, if major Linux browsers implement Pepper API, on the other hand it will mean that we (the users) won't have to bother installing (deb/rpm/etc) packages every now or then. Maybe it will turn out better.
[+] [-] rplnt|14 years ago|reply
Just another step in pushing Chrome down everyone's throat.
[+] [-] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
So really, the only things I'm missing are flash games I don't play and ads I don't watch. (Some flash games actually sort of work, but it's not dependable.)
[+] [-] chimeracoder|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] figital|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psquid|14 years ago|reply
Source? Or is that just conjecture?
[+] [-] scythe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinschuh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donniezazen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unabridged|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrbill|14 years ago|reply