[jdowdell]

> I understand that this is the future and hate Flash as > much as the next guy, but I just don't understand why > we're just suddenly bashing Adobe.

I've been wondering about the recent change myself. Considering that it's not election season, it seems prudent to wonder about the sudden flood of unverifiable identities in discussion forums. Hard to tell, but necessary to wonder.

[mortenjorck]

JD, I understand that you can't speak for Adobe as a whole, but in your perception, what would be the biggest obstacles to open-sourcing the Flash Player? Apart from inertia, what is the value in keeping it a proprietary product when, as has been voiced by John Nack, Adobe's stake is in the creation apps and not in the runtime?

[jdowdell]

Parts are (Tamarin, frameworks, Open Screen Project partnerships), but parts cannot (codecs licensed from third-parties are a key blocker).

Dave McAllister has a single-screen summary, and I've got some background history, both with plenty of links: http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail... http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/07/opening_the_flash_file_for...

[kevingadd]

Hi jd. I applaud your willingness to ask tough questions like 'who are these (unspecified) unverifiable identities posting (unspecified) things about Flash on (unspecified) forums who only started posting (unspecified) days ago?'. If you ask me this smacks of a sweeping anti-Adobe conspiracy, no doubt orchestrated by (malicious Apple fanboys|the Moonlight development team|those sneaky swedes).

The current outpouring of negativity over Flash is in no way a continuation of past trends and does not represent any sort of culmination of widespread customer anguish over Adobe's (perceived or real) failure to address paying and nonpaying customers' needs for a stable, performant, secure way to create interactive media.

The comparatively rapid progress of <canvas>, <video> and <audio> in the past few years versus the rest of Flash's lifespan should in no way be interpreted as a sign that people have become fed up with being dependent on a badly engineered, unreliable, overpriced piece of technology from a self-sabotaging software juggernaut.

[statictype]

Continuation of past trends? Flash has always been mildly despised, but ever since the announcement of the iPad, this Flash-bashing and consequent Adobe-bashing has meteorically risen. Every day now, there are multiple articles on HN and elsewhere justifying why the iPad doesn't and shouldn't run Flash.