Flash Is Not a Right 850
medcalf notes that game designer Ian Bogost enters the debate about Flash by saying
"[A] large number of developers seem to think that they have the right to make software for the iPhone (or for anything else) in Flash, or in another high-level environment of their choosing. Literally, the right, not just the convenience or the opportunity. And many of them are quite churlish about the matter.
This strikes me as a very strange sort of attitude to adopt. There's no question that Flash is useful and popular, and it has a large and committed user base. There's also no question that it's often convenient to be able to program for different platforms using environments one already knows. And likewise, there's a long history of creating OS stubs or wrappers or other sorts of gizmos to make it possible to run code 'alien' to a platform in a fashion that makes it feel more native.
But what does it say about the state of programming practice writ large when so many developers believe that their 'rights' are trampled because they cannot write programs for a particular device in a particular language? Or that their 'freedom' as creators is squelched for the same reason?"
The interesting part to me... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Provided... (Score:2, Informative)
No. The Dev kit is free for download. Way to flame though.
Re:Provided... (Score:4, Informative)
The devkit is free but you are limited to using the iPhone simulator. If you want to dump your code to an actual device then you need to pay the $99 fee.
Re:Provided... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually that's not a flame. The only way to download the SDK is if you pay to become an iPhone developer and even if you did acquire the SDK through other means, you'd still need a certificate from Apple to actually run it on your phone. The only other option is to jailbreak the phone.
Re:Provided... (Score:2, Informative)
I believe the free dev kit doesn't enable installations. The paid version does. Which at this time would also get you the iPhone OS 4.
Re:Provided... (Score:4, Informative)
The SDK is free, but you have to buy a code signing certificate from Apple ($99) in order for software to be allowed to run and install on the device during development, but yes once you do that you can install whatever you want on your own device.
Re:It's because Apple can't let go... and design.. (Score:1, Informative)
Right To Read (Score:3, Informative)
We're certainly on the road to the future spelled out here [gnu.org].
Re:Provided... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You signed away this "right" by picking Apple. (Score:2, Informative)
Um.... the Flex SDK (which outputs Flash files, aka RIAs) is open source and free. If by "development tools cost more" you mean they are free, then you're right.
Thanks for playing.
Re:It's part of monopoly/anti-trust laws (Score:3, Informative)
Flash is Proprietary (Score:2, Informative)
Adobe publishes the specification for Flash, but the license stipulates that you may only use it to create authoring tools, and that Adobe remains the sole source of Flash playback software. Some may argue that this merely covers them against a Microsoft Embrace->Extend situation, but I'm pretty sure anyone who has tried to use Flash on x86 linux will remember how poor a job Adobe does in making the player. Adobe could barely make a version of Flash to run well on a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM; you really think they can make it run on a cell phone?
Re:You signed away this "right" by picking Apple. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sounds like a Case of the Spostas (Score:3, Informative)
It's not as if Apple's hidden the fact that Flash isn't supported. It's not like you USED to be able to use it and now you can't -- they've been VERY open about their dick-waving with Adobe.
This also falls on Adobe -- it's not as if they've been able to run full-fledged Flash content at production quality on any mobile device yet either. I have to admit to a sense of teapot-tempest over "Apple sez you can't have what doesn't even exist yet!"
And w.r.t. the closed/open meme-wars going on: I decidedly don't hear the sounds of these same developers chucking their {PS3,Wii,XBox}'es into the dumpster over their "ev1l closed platformedness." Console platforms have traditionally had heavy restrictions at both the business and development levels. Nor do I hear the feds knocking down Sony's or Nintendo's or Microsoft's doors over the antitrust ramifications of their respective consoles.
Re:Two senses of "closed." (Score:5, Informative)
Apple also refused to license Fairplay DRM, which ment that the music that you puchased from iTunes could only realistically be played on Apple devices (Quicktime/Itunes on a PC is not a significant exception). WMA DRM locked you into certain devices, but not only Microsoft-marketed devices. That insanity is "all bad."
BTW: Fairplay did not kill DRM in the music industry. Amazon [wikipedia.org] killed DRM in the music industry.
Re:Two senses of "closed." (Score:4, Informative)
Apple changed the rules after the game started (Score:5, Informative)
But that's the problem, they DIDN'T tell me first. They snuck this clause into the EULA of the most recent update. It's a little late in the game to be changing the rules, especially when Adobe invested a lot of time and money into creating an iPhone development tool which followed all of Apple's rules up to that point.
Re:Two senses of "closed." (Score:3, Informative)
Apple only killed off DRM when Amazon started selling music with no DRM at lower prices than Apple. It was a reactionary move.
Re:Two senses of "closed." (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Right to use your device as you see fit (Score:4, Informative)
Then install whatever the hell you want. Apple isn't *preventing* you from installing flash on your iPhone, it's merely making it difficult.
Actually, they're making it illegal [eff.org].
Re:Two senses of "closed." (Score:3, Informative)
Apple also refused to license Fairplay DRM, which ment that the music that you puchased from iTunes could only realistically be played on Apple devices
And that is exactly why we eventually got DRM-free music from the major labels. The labels were getting uneasy about Apple's unanticipated power in the marketplace.
WMA DRM locked you into certain devices, but not only Microsoft-marketed devices.
Which is even worse in many ways. What Apple did with DRM only affected their own platform. Microsoft, on the other hand, could act as a market bully and affect third parties. And it did indeed pull the rug out from under those third parties with the abandonment of "Plays For Sure."
BTW: Fairplay did not kill DRM in the music industry. Amazon [wikipedia.org] killed DRM in the music industry.
Incorrect. Jobs called from DRM to end, and actually had DRM-free music on iTunes before the Amazon store opened. However, EMI was the only label to do this initially. The other labels wanted to use DRM as a bargaining chip to get variable pricing from Apple. And they used Amazon to get it. It's not like if iTunes didn't exist, and the labels weren't engaged in a battle with Jobs they would have just gone to Amazon and said "here, sell our songs DRM free." It was a calculated move to get the changes they wanted in iTunes.
Re:Two senses of "closed." (Score:3, Informative)
Put another way, Apple has no right to regulate the road developers take to arrive at a point, only the point that they arrive at. They are doing the former, not the latter.
Really? You are the arbiter of Apple's rights? You have the "right" to arbitrarily decide how Apple runs their own business? According to your line of reasoning I have the right to tell you how to make and spend your money.
So, from now on you cannot buy, or use, any products made by Apple, Microsoft, RedHat, Novell, Intel, AMD, NVidia, WD, Hitachi, Dell, Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba, any Linux distro, etc.... I've restricted your ability to use any of these products because I have arbitrarily decided that I don't like what you're doing. You now have to make your living by mowing lawns too.
Do you like my decisions about how you make, and what you can do with, your money? Does it sound just-a-tad-arrogant on my part for me to tell you what you can and can't do with your money, your resources? If it sounds stupid to you, well, that's how you sound. Thinking you have the right to tell someone else how to run their business is just as stupid.
You can object to what Apple does. You can decide not to support them in protest of how they do business. You can protest as much as you want. But, you can't decide what Apple's "rights" really are. You have neither the right, nor the authority, to make that proclamation. We live in a Republic, not a Soviet-style authoritarian Communist country, where we all have the ability, and the right, to choose how we live and do business, as long as it isn't illegal, and what Apple is doing isn't even close to being illegal, nor should it be. Unless, of course, you want other people to have that kind of power over your life too.
Re:Here's a link to check out; (Score:1, Informative)
Bullshit. Adobe has got out a prerelease that uses the new Apple APIs that allow access for H.264 decoding, and its decoding performance still throats all the balls. At the same time, VLC has had excellent H.264 decoding performance on Mac OS X for years and years. Adobe was simply too damn lazy to bother doing efficient coding for the Mac.
And it was never only video performance of Flash that caused CPU usage to rise to 100% and fans to turn on. You always got (and still get under the new prerelease) the same miserable performance from random H.264-free Flash ads when browsing the web.
Flash on Mac OS X SUCKS and it has nothing to do with access to the APIs.
Not revisionism (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously, have you ever talked to anybody in the media player business? We *all* hate DRM - it's a pain in the neck to do well, there's absolutely no benefit to the end user (our customer), and you have to make ridiculous commitments to the content providers - about physical security of the keys, procedures for managing the inevitable discovery of workarounds, etc.
I worked on the iPod team, and later for a company using Windows Media DRM. You might remember that the original version of the iPod had no DRM at all - we just put a "don't steal music" sticker on it, and stored the songs in a "hidden" folder.
The record labels insisted on Apple imposing a DRM scheme for the iTunes store. They would have preferred that Apple license Windows Media, but as you might imagine, that idea really didn't fly for Apple.
Instead, Apple created Fairplay, which was enormously less restrictive and annoying to end-users, most of whom were never aware that it existed at all. At the time "unlimited play on up to 5 computers and an unlimited number of iPods" was an incredible step forward compared to the mess that was WM-DRM.
Without the success of Apple's much-less restrictive scheme, the record companies would never have considered allowing Amazon to sell DRM-free songs.