Adobe Fails To Explains Why Flash Is Not Open Source

Adobe have posted a blog “explaining” why Flash can not be made open source:

“The main reason we can’t release Flash Player as open source is because there is technology in the Player that we don’t own, such as the industry standard hi-def video codec, H.264.”

This is, of course, complete BS. Have they never heard of libraries? Just release the bits you can and let the open source world plug the video decoder hole with ffmpeg. Perhaps the real reason is that, these days, most of the use for Flash on the web is nothing more than a glorified video decoder. Which would become very clear very quickly if an open source Flash is released sans video decoding. Of course, we’ll soon have HTML5 and the <video> tag so the discussion will be moot and Adobe will be left wishing they’d open sourced earlier.

While we’re on the subject, here’s the Flash bug page by Matthew Dempsky which claims to exploit a bug reported to Adobe in September 2008 which is still not fixed but which will crash your browser. Adobe responds after a fashion. Adobe have claimed in the past that Flash player does not ship with known crashing bugs.