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by davexunit 4638 days ago
Because Adobe has long been profiting greatly from their proprietary Flash player and other related software. Had the Flash format been a free standard and Flash player had no restriction on reverse engineering we would have had free Flash players for a long time.
1 comments
robmcm 4638 days ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#SwfDec

Adobe actually made their Flash money from tooling and supporting services.

If they open sourced the spec and turned it into a commitie it would be in the same mess as HTML 5 and lose it's advantages (fast development, adoption for example).

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davexunit 4638 days ago
It suffers from the biggest disadvantage of all: being proprietary. Flash is a massive wart on the free web.
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robmcm 4638 days ago
That's a double edged sword, proprietary software moves much much faster which is why plugins like flash came about. They plugged the gaps required that the web working groups couldn't agree on.

If proprietary was such a big disadvantage why would it exist at all?

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davexunit 4638 days ago
It's a disadvantage for the user, and an advantage for the business. The user is the one that matters here.
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robmcm 4637 days ago
Was it a disadvantage for all those people who got to play great games or watch video on the web for years before HTML 5 added the canvas or video tag? Would we have half the features in HTML 5 if they hadn't been proved by plugins or implemented as experimental by proprietary browsers?
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