I don't know... I thought The Steve had some very good points. Since you supposedly want a discussion about it, Jim. I'll respond a bit.
Adobe isn't "open". Adobe is "proprietary".
Apple is the Queen of Proprietary.
First off, he didn't say "Adobe is proprietary", he said "Flash is proprietary" and that is absolutely true, and there is a difference. Adobe makes plenty of "closed" software (Adobe Photoshop and InDesign, for example), but Steve wasn't complaining about any of those packages. He was drawing a distinction between building closed software and devices (Adobe Photoshop, JRiver MC15, the iPhone, and Apple MacOSX, to name a few) and having a closed standard used as the primary video and animation delivery vehicle on the web. I think this is an important and not irrelevant distinction. If Flash is left to exist as the de-facto standard on the web for video, there is nothing to stop Adobe from demanding per-stream licensing fees at some point in the future. There is nothing to stop them from breaking existing content (without anyone having any say) with a new version of the Flash player, and there is no opportunity for other people to build competing "players" which might have better security or performance.
Regarding the hypocrisy... Apple does certainly make a lot of extremely proprietary and locked-down products, you'll get no argument from me there. However, they do also support and create a LOT of open standards. Some that I can think of off the top of my head that were basically purely or mostly Apple created: MP4 (based on, and effectively a replica of, the Quicktime MOV container), WebKit (written by Apple and released as open source), and RTSP and HTTP Streaming. Many other standards also had a LOT of support and assistance from Apple: OpenCL, IEEE1394, and HTML5 to name just a few recent ones. They draw a firm line between what they view as their "products" (software and hardware), which are locked-down to high heaven, and their "internet technologies" which are often open and freely available for even competitors to use. For example: you can write your own RTSP streaming server competing with the Quicktime Streaming Server if you want (and some companies, like Wowza, have done just that). Steve admitted as much in his letter. He clearly stated: "Apple has many proprietary products too." You may believe that they often are far too closed with their software and hardware lockdowns (and I'd agree with you wholeheartedly) but the "Queen of Proprietary" title you award them is far from a clear win. I'd say there are others out there (Intel, for example) who are at least equally deserving.
Flash isn't a standard. H264 is a better choice.
I think you misunderstood his point on this topic. He wasn't comparing "Flash" to "H264". That wouldn't make sense because they are two different things, like saying "Shoes are better than cheeseburgers." One is a video compression standard and one is a web-focused extension framework, which can be used to serve video, but is not a video format in any way (not anymore, anyway). He was simply explaining that most video on the web is
already available using the open H264 standard,
including the Flash video. This is simply a fact, and Adobe agrees! Adobe abandoned their old proprietary FLV video format with Flash 9 (soon after they purchased the tech from Macromedia) in favor of using H264 compression and the MP4 container.
Very little current video on the web is still in FLV format anymore, even though most of it is "served" by a Flash player widget. For example, on my non-profit's web site, we serve all of our video using FlowPlayer, which is a Flash player (one of these days I want to switch to JWPlayer, but that's another story).
However, all of the video files actually served by the embedded Flash player are H264 MP4 files, just as Adobe recommends. Steve's point, and it is a good one, is that using a Flash player made sense when you couldn't embed these video files directly in a page (because no browser would know how to play them, or give you a controller bar, or control over how and when and in what way the video would play). Flash solved all of these problems and was quite ubiquitous. However, now that there IS an open standard for playing video (HTML5) and most of the browsers can just use that, there is no longer any benefit for the web developer to using a Flash player. Why NOT use an open standard instead, since your existing video assets are already ready-to-go as-is?
However, the situation isn't as simple as he pretends in his diatribe. There are still some substantial stumbling blocks that he left out. For example, while Microsoft has now committed to fully implementing it in IE9 when it arrives, they did NOT implement the VIDEO embed tag in HTML5 in their currently-shipping (and still #1 market share) web browser. Making the situation worse, both Mozilla and Opera have refused to support H264 video compression in their HTML5 implementations because while it is an open IEEE standard, some of the underlying compression technologies are patent encumbered. They chose to implement Theora compressed video in an OGM container (why they didn't choose MKV is beyond me, but anyway). Theora is okay, but is no where near the quality of MPEG-4 ASP (H264), roughly equivalent in quality to older DivX/XviD encodes. This fight has led to a bit of a fragmented HTML5 video support environment, with Apple, Adobe, Google, and almost certainly eventually Microsoft supporting the H264/MP4 standard and Mozilla, Opera, and Google supporting the Theora/OGM standard. Luckily the Video embed tag in HTML5 does have a means to deal with this semi-gracefully, but it does force people like me who create the video for the web, to generate a pile of duplicate files in different formats for every single video we publish. I understand why Mozilla and Opera feel the way they do, but Theora just isn't good enough. They need to either adopt H264 or allow third-parties to build plug-in renderers for their browsers so that H264 video works using the video embed tag.
"Flash is the number one reason Macs crash."
Oh brother.
Steve. Macs crash? Really? I don't know that. I use a Windows PC. It doesn't crash. I've never seen Flash crash Windows.
I have to agree with you here, somewhat. The Flash implementation on Windows is pretty good as far as crashes go, though it is
awful on both OSX and all of the flavors of Linux and UNIX. But, that is actually part of Steve's point... The problem is that no one except Adobe can fix it, and if they aren't motivated to spend valuable resources building well-optimized versions of the Flash plugin for Apple's operating system (and keep in mind, fully 50% of their money-making software Suite is sold to Mac users), how likely do you think it is that they will spend time fixing the performance of their Solaris build? Or the Debian Linux version? Or the Red-Hat version? The issue is that there is no opportunity for competition to improve the problems. There's no way for a third-party company to come in and fix it, you just have to wait and hope that Adobe eventually will do it (and it will certainly be on their timeframe). There is no opportunity for competition to drive Adobe to fix it, which becomes something of a lock-in to the Windows platform. If we allow Flash to stay a "web standard", and Adobe decides to stop making a version of the Flash player for Linux or OSX or Solaris or BSD, then that will make those platforms unable to access the full web experience. His point is that the web is different from software. That it was designed to be a level playing field, and that allowing one company with one proprietary standard to control it themselves unilaterally, is harmful to consumer choice and society as a whole. He is saying that it is a different thing than locking down an operating system or an iPod, because, if you don't like what Apple does with their hardware and software, you can choose not to buy a Mac or an iPod and choose a Windows or Linux computer instead (or a Sansa or a Zune). Apple isn't doing anything to lock you out of the Web with their proprietary ways.
Again, I think he paints a bit rosy of a scenario. The App Store and their mobile devices are completely locked down, and I'm not a fan of that policy at all. Apple views the App Store as a store, similar to iTunes or Amazon MP3 Store, and not a "communications medium". I think the line is a bit blurry here, though there is certainly still lots of consumer choice. If you don't like the policies, you can always buy an Android device or WebOS phone if you prefer, and you can still get on the web and still get software for your device.
His other point in this section, which you skipped over, Jim is probably even more relevant.
Where is this legendary Mobile Flash that Apple is supposed to approve? It doesn't exist. It is completely and utterly vaporware, not just for Apple's hardware, but for all of the current ARM-based mobile platforms (sorry, the stripped down thing they call "Flash" on Windows Mobile doesn't count, all code has to be custom written for it and it has nothing even approaching a full feature set). Adobe has been promising this for years now. Where is it? Where is this proof that current generation ARM hardware can actually run full Flash content with acceptable performance? Maybe if Adobe was actually shipping a product for Apple's competitors (and launch dates hadn't slipped for over two years) so that Google and Palm/HP could proudly pronounce "we have full Flash support, na-na-na-na", then Apple's song would be a bit different. But so far, it has been vaporware. All promise and no delivery.
You also skipped over one of his 6 major points entirely, which was security. And on this, I completely agree. Adobe has a dismal security track record, especially in their Acrobat and Flash technologies. Literally two weeks don't go by before some website (often top-tier sites like MSNBC or The New York Times) ends up serving their users a malicious Flash SWF that exploits a security hole in the Flash plugin to install malware.
Even high-tech sites aren't immune. It happened just a few weeks ago at Anandtech, of all places. Mashable and the Drudge Report got hit a few weeks before that, and so on and so forth. Macromedia never designed Flash with modern security concepts in mind, just like Microsoft didn't design Windows 95 with fundamental security concerns in mind, and so it is fundamentally broken. It needs to be re-written from the ground up, and Adobe has shown NO inkling of a plan to do so. In fact, just a few months ago, they announced that they weren't even going to release security patches for critical flaws except on a quarterly basis! They backed down a month or two later, but the fact that they even had this laughable plan shows a callous disregard for computer security and a fundamental misunderstanding of the responsibility that comes with that 98.9% installed base with a web-connected technology.
Author
Topic: Open Letter to Steve Jobs -- Apple Flash Back (Read 23293 times)