[kirse]

I have Flash on my Nokia N900... Runs smoothly and nicely, too! Directly via the default Firefox browser!

This may come as a surprise to some, but there's a whole mobile world outside of the Apple iPhone... you get far better hardware, no lock-in, and (now with Android/Maemo) a very solid UI.

[CrazedGeek]

Can you send a little of that smooth-and-nice my way?

You say there's no lock-in outside of the iPhone, but what do you call Flash? Yes, the spec is technically open, but there still haven't been any players that work as "well" as Adobe's. Which, by the way, is many people's problem, as Flash Player has been nothing but a pain to me. The Linux and OS X versions are horrible and Adobe's done very little to fix them.

Also, I'd kinda dispute the "better hardware" and "solid UI" claims - better is very subjective, and Android's UI could hardly be considered "solid" (the portions of MeeGo from Moblin look promising though).

(I feel silly to include this, but it could be necessary: I don't currently own a single Apple product, my main computers run Windows & Linux, and my phone is a Samsung Moment which runs Android 2.1.)

[biafra]

I really do not care about Flash. What I care about is the freedom to use any programming language that I like or see fit for the problem at hand. Section 3.3.1 is not only banning Flash although that would be wrong too. It bans _every_ other language than the three C's and "JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine".

The argument is not that Flash is open or the holy grail. It is that Apple forbids the use of any unapproved language. And the real problem is that they can prohibit it's use because they dictate whats availabe for the iPhone and what's not.

The world would be a better place if they could not get away with this. Let's hope they can't.

[aero142]

Agreed, this whole flash things is a distraction from the real effect, which is vendor lockin.

[varaon]

> Yes, the spec is technically open, but there still haven't been any players that work as "well" as Adobe's.

It's a valid point, but a lack of good competition doesn't make the standard any less open; published is published. Consider 2002-2004, when Internet Explorer had nearly 95% market share [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers]. HTML was an open standard, but no viable competitor existed until Firefox was released.

[CrazedGeek]

I had originally made a comment about rtmpdump, but I realized that my logic was a bit silly, so I replaced it with something slightly less silly.

My point (that I didn't really make) is that Adobe and Apple are both equally proprietary. Trying to argue either side will be a loser's game.

(I offer as an illustration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-ENUWAxzc0 [audio's NSFW])