| I've been wondering why they haven't done this for a very, very long time. The player itself has not been a source of revenue for Adobe for quite some time (they used to license Flash Lite to handset manufacturers and made money off of that), instead they make all their money by selling tools to make content for that runtime. I'm hoping someone from Adobe is reading this, because I've never really heard a rational business reason for why the Player is not open source. So here are my questions for Adobe: Is there still income from Flash Player licensing? If not, how does keeping the Player closed source help your business interests? Is it the client side DRM you have in place in the Player that's stopping you from making it open source? Do you not have the resources to communicate with the community that would develop around an open sourced player (knowing that you would have spend some time to justify many things that exist in the codebase to maintain backwards compatibility)? Are you concerned that a rival would clone some of the technology you developed and implement it in their proprietary player (e.g. MS, but they already gave up on Silverlight)? Would the sudden influx of new security patches as vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed potentially compromise the performance of the Player? Are you worried that individuals with malicious intent will find new vulnerabilities and exploit them? What are your other concerns that are preventing you from open sourcing the Flash Player? |
Google pays lots of money for Adobe to auto opt-in Flash installs with Chrome.