Adobe is seriously doing it all wrong. They have to open-source the Flash Player and everything around it now. They can keep the IDE proprietary if that floats their boat, it's just a premium authoring tool, but the only way to save Flash is to open-source like NOW. HTML5 is still young enough that an open Flash Player and standard and protocol (RTMP) would effectively kill it.

Open-sourcing would open so many doors. Apple could modify Flash until it worked on iOS properly, Google could modify until it worked on Android. The reason this hasn't happened so far is that Adobe is a bottleneck nobody wants to deal with; they just consider basically impossible to get Flash Player on mobile because Adobe doesn't have the structure or the talent to do it correctly, and there is no other option except to let Adobe do it. An open Flash would open many doors, awesome adaptations, deployments, and uses that we can't yet think up would come out of it, and all the while Adobe would keep selling its IDE (probably selling more, actually, because Flash will then do cool stuff that everyone wants).

I don't know why they don't do this. Flash Player is already basically free, all of the money from Flash comes from the IDE Adobe sells. Keep the IDE locked up if you want, Adobe, but every second you keep the Player locked up you are killing Flash that much more, and when nobody uses Flash nobody is going to buy your IDE.

I know there are free software Flash players out there, but it's not the same. It's like saying nobody needs cooperation from nvidia because of nouveau. While a noble effort with meaningful results, vendor support still gets you much, much farther ahead.

If Adobe knows what's good for them they will be opening the Flash Player as quickly as they possibly can. They are going to be very sorry that they didn't. They probably will eventually take this route as a last-ditch effort when Flash content has dipped like 80% and been replaced by HTML5/JS, but that will be too late. This is Adobe's last chance, they must open it now if they expect any kind of future from it.

Flash is too big for Adobe alone, and if they don't want the whole thing to crash and burn totally and have that revenue dry up, they need to open ASAP. This should be the number one priority at Adobe.

Why would they do this? It seemed obvious to me than in 5-10 years Antivirus software would be obsolete and unnecessary. I hear people every day recommending Windows 7 users get Microsoft Security Essentials and nothing else. And personally I run Ubuntu, so I haven't thought about antivirus software in years...

This seems like a very odd decision to me. Intel, a world leader in processor design, does not need to get into such a sleazy business as antivirus software.

Why not spend that $7.7 billion helping the world write better code?

After _why disappeared, everyone decided to pick up his projects. I watched as people stood up left and right, saying "I'll take over hpricot," "I'll work on Shoes," "I've got Camping," and I thought, man, this would be a great time to step up and really give back. My only real open source contributions were my own projects, that nobody really uses. I could never seem to find anything useful to contribute elsewhere.

My favorite project of _why's was Hackety Hack. I _was_ that kid who learned to program with GW-BASIC when I was seven, and the world is totally different now. So I checked out who had stood up to work on Hackety... and nobody did.

As the day progressed, I expected someone to. It was _why's masterpiece, after all. Lots of the other libraries he wrote are part of Hackety. I didn't want the responsibility of taking charge of such a well-known project, since I'm just a nobody. I figured that someone better than me would step up, and then I could just help them.

But nobody did.

Finally, after lots of thinking about it, I gave a small little "I will." Bam. I'm in charge. Sweet! ...

Oh God, this is scary! This is a huge responsibility. What if I do poorly? Everybody on the internet will see. Can I really do this? I haven't even been coding in Ruby all that long!

Then, to complicate things, I had some personal stuff come up, and I couldn't really find the time in my schedule to actually write some code. There were also upstream issues; Hackety needed Shoes 3, which was in development still, and really unstable and an absolute motherfucker to compile. So I got frustrated when I even did try to work on it.

By Christmas last year, I had made some small modifications, and released it as 0.9, hoping to get some people interested to give me some support. But that didn't really happen. So, I trucked along, doing little bits here and there.

Finally, I had a serious breakthrough with my Shoes development. I got it to work with Snow Leopard. That's a whole other story. But the momentum and high off of doing that got me to put a bunch more work into Hackety, and I made some decent progress. Also, around this time, I got an email from Fela, who wanted to work on Ruby Summer of Code. And he wanted to do it with Hackety. Between he, myself, the Shoes team, and some of my friends, we've made really great strides with the project over the summer, and I couldn't be happier. 1.0-final should be out within a month, once we polish up some more things, and sort out a few issues. I still occasionally grapple with "not being _why", if that makes any sense. It's hard to be respectful of a legacy and yet make something your own at the same time.

That wasn't really quick, but there you go.

You are assuming that the only thing preventing Flash from working on mobile is that it hasn't been "optimized" enough -- that opening the source to Google and Apple will unlock performance otherwise unattainable by Adobe.

But suppose Adobe's programmers are not completely incompetent? Perhaps Flash's execution model is genuinely unable to be optimized further. Or perhaps most Flash content in the wild runs at the limits of desktop performance, and that compositing vector graphics and text on top of video while running multiple VMs embedded in a webpage is just too much for a memory- and CPU-constrained device.

In that case, open-sourcing Flash would have little effect. Even if we had an optimal mobile Flash player, we'd still need everyone to rewrite their Flash movies to run well on it. That's why HTML5 has the advantage here: HTML5 content is being freshly written and tested for mobile platforms.

If you blacklist the mechanism by which tens of percentage points worth of Internet users send mail, you are not part of the solution to spam.