We develop a lot of stuff in Flash. All of our games, in fact. I was pretty excited about using the new CS5 to build versions for the iPhone and iPad. Then Apple gave the finger to Adobe and screwed all the developers out there. Because we so love to re-write everything for 14 different platforms. Flashback: That’s why Windows won.
Anyway, more to the point: what should Adobe do?
If I were the CEO I would take one simple action that would solve all of these issues. I would make Flash open source. Adobe makes most of their money from development tools, not from the plug-ins or the language, so it probably wouldn’t have a meaningful revenue impact. It would mean that all the “open” vs. “proprietary” discussions would immediately end – Flash would be open. It would mean all the optimization issues would go away, since Apple would have the code and could optimize it for their devices. It would win Adobe a lot of friends in the open source community and among web developers in general.
So that’s my free advice to Adobe: open source Flash and win!
Do you know there’s a petition to ask Adobe to open source Flash Player source code http://www.openplayer.net/ ? Please sign and share!
That’s a good point. Thinking about the possibilities of flash on apple products is awesome. The one thing I really am frustrated about with my iPhone (that and my annoying ringtones).
Plus, having flash as open source would be like Epic Games offering the UDK. It’d open up independent development even more.
How will this affect the stock options