Mozilla speaks out against the free-but-proprietary Web apps
Mozilla Europe's founder, Tristan Nitot, has no problem with free software. Indeed, his organization has created some of the best of it. But when software technologies like Adobe Systems' Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight are free but proprietary, they can create all sorts of problems. "Free" without "open" can become a one-way ticket to technology prison.
Adobe has recently taken steps to open up its Flash technology, but Nitot's concern is still valid:
He described the nature of the Web at the moment as open but suggested that "proprietary solutions running on top of the Web are trying to take over"..."So far, there has not been a problem," Nitot said. "Both Adobe and Microsoft have been willing to give (Flash and Silverlight away) for free. But maybe they have an agenda. They're not here for the glory; they're here for the money."
Nitot gave two historical examples of Microsoft and Adobe withdrawing or withholding products from certain platforms: Microsoft's discontinuation of Internet Explorer for Unix and Mac, and Adobe's long-standing refusal to "provide a recent version of Flash for Linux users." He suggested that Web developers should be asking those companies whether they are "sure that Silverlight and Flash will always be available on all platforms (and) run decently on all platforms."
It's a good point. Internet Explorer has done the industry a disservice by providing a one-way gate into Microsoft technologies. Indeed, this is consistent with Microsoft's history of requiring all of its technology to lead into Redmond--and rarely out.
There's one very easy way to resolve the tension: open source. Open standards are a nice start, but they provide no way to guarantee the future openness of a product. Only open source leaves the gate free to swing both in and out of a technology.
In short, open source is a good way to ensure that "free" doesn't come to mean "prison."
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Free & Open vs. Free & Proprietary doesn't really matter. If a mfg gives away a good piece of software that is free and proprietary people will use it or decide not to. The market will decide. It is not necessary for something to be open for it to be good. If something sucks the market simply won't use it.
Flash is great and has revolutionized the web and mobile in many ways. It not being "open" has not hurt its utility, functionality and usefulness to the marketplace.
I think it is time for everyone to get over the free/open vs free/prop argument. If its good people will use it regardless of whether the source is open or not.
Case in point. You note how IE has done a disservice. If it has then something else will take its place. This is exactly what is happening. Firefox is rising in usage and at a point where IE had 95% plus marketshare that has been cut into. Either MS gets their product together or people will use something else. The market goes where the products deliver. The price is one factor but open vs prop does not have to be if the company delivers the goods
Flash is not great. It is extremely flawed in design.
The Mono team is also working on Moonlight which runs Silverlight apps via Mono and it is open source! Microsoft is even assisting in it and they have come a long way so far though it hasn't been released yet.
The cases of IE/FF and Flash/? are not equivalent. Web browsers all work with a common set of open protocols and markup languages. This makes creating a competing product relatively easy. Flash does not. What protocols and formats would a competitor to Flash use?
A better equivalent to Flash/? is Microsoft Office/OpenOffice.org. A simple glance at the market for office software will tell you that despite the disservice to the public that Microsoft renders with its proprietary office suite AND closed file format that that same public has, until recently, had no real choice to turn to. OpenOffice is its closest rival, and it has struggled against a set of closed file formats for years in order to provide an alternative with decent file format compatibility.
That same problem exists with producing a Flash rival. So far, flash players from Adobe are freely available. But that is not where they make money on Flash; they make it on the full Flash product which allows producing content. The current Flash formats are released by Adobe only under restricted licenses which do not permit creating programs capable of playing back the content and which do not disclose the compression formats used.
The need for an open specification not controlled by Adobe is obvious. The public is not served by a closed-source, license-restricted and opaque file format in ubiquitous use when competition is impossible. Look at the telephone industry in the United States in the late seventies. AT&T controlled the entire infrastructure of telephone communications in most of North America. The only innovations in that industry from 1900 to 1980 that were visible to consumers were direct dial phones and touch tone.
Only after breaking up AT&T and forcing them to open the infrastructure to competitors did consumers see anything new. Cordless phones, pagers, answering machines, cell phones and all the services that come with them began to appear shortly afterward.
Is Flash on the same level as telephone service? Not now, but it could be developed into a platform for applications. And if Adobe is the only player in a position to deliver that platform, they stand to gain hugely at the expense of the public, who will have no choice but to buy Adobe products.
Do we really want to repeat the mistakes of the 80's and 90's by putting all our eggs and our trust in one platform basket like we did with Microsoft Windows and Office?
Microsoft and Adobe inherited a commanding lead and an easy life to go with it. They are not only losing that lead but are huffing and puffing as it happens. The handwriting is on the wall. The snowball is reaching critical momentum.
Mono is faulty by design just as will be any OOXML product. Mono is one of the efforts that keeps Microsoft happy and paying Novell. Microsoft is dying for developers to leave truly open formats to go and code in formats Microsoft controls and which will always only really survive on closed Monopolyware.
When will Monopolyware officially become Garbageware? Guess the date to win a dolly.
You get the wrong meaning of 'free'. Here 'free' means 'free as in freedom', not as beer.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
Freewere(proprietary) mens 'free as in beer' but you can't have the source.
"Free & Open vs. Free & Proprietary doesn't really matter."
Yes it does. You didn't have problem with using flash so you don't get it(Adobie was pretty ****** and they didn't want to port it to Gnu/Linux) . Author of article have explained it quite well.
- by dazweeja May 5, 2008 11:23 PM PDT
- I'm a programmer in Flex which runs in the Flash Player. Why do people use Flash player to distribute their content? Because it's the best alternative for many of the things they want to do. Are some people here seriously arguing that HTML/CSS/Javascript can do everything that Flash can do? Of course not. Flash is years ahead of what is possible in these technologies. Should Adobe stop innovating, stop improving the user experience, and wait ten years for open source to catch up? Adobe has done more to move the web forward than any other company. Should multinational car companies stop investing in green technologies because they are for-profit entities? Should big pharmaceuticals stop developing AIDS drugs? I hope Flash gets better and better.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(10 Comments)In my opinion, the worst thing that happened to web development was the complete and utter disaster that is CSS. Separate content from presentation - great idea! - but how about looking at how people design websites and try to give them the presentation tools to do it. Before CSS almost every website used tables - grid layout is one of the most fundamental design principles. You want a CSS table-equivalent, forget it! The CSS committee doesn't think you need one. They think you should design in a different way and you'd agree if only you knew what was good for you. You want a fixed-width left sidebar, fixed-width right sidebar and a fluid centre column, with all columns equal length? Good luck hacking your way to that one! Under five mintues with a table. Spend a couple of minutes doing layout in Flex - absolute layout, vertical layout, horizontal layout, advanced constraints, all working exactly how you'd expect them too - and then tell me that open standards are always the best.
I don't ever want to go back to the days of spending half my project time doing painful cross-platform debugging, testing and CSS layout. if this is your cup of tea, go right ahead, knock yourself out!