Adobe Flash: Just because Steve Jobs says it's bad doesn't mean it's good

Steve Jobs' self-serving Thoughts on Flash were controversial to say the least. Yes, he was hypocritical and self-serving (as usual), but he certainly wasn't wrong.

Adobe wants everyone to treat Flash as if it is an open standard, but they haven't made it open source. They made some parts of it open source, but not the parts that matter - and as a result, developers are constantly left wondering which platforms are going to work.



As a friend said, "Apple seems just as evil as Microsoft, just not as
successful. And Jobs seems even more evil than Bill Gates. Certainly
a bigger bastard." I totally question Steve Jobs' motives in wanting to crush Flash, but I don't think Adobe deserves a great deal of sympathy.

AIR delays the inevitable

I've made a bit of peace with AIR since my post earlier. The release notes actually do mention how to install it, and twhirl does work (pretty much, anyhow).

The ridiculousness of blowing away OOo does underscore that folks at Adobe don't work on Linux – doubtless they only really work on Mac and Windows. The fact that they never noticed they had murdered OOo proves it. They don't really understand free software (big surprise, they make their money selling Photoshop discs) and their AIR platform is a roach motel built to extend the life of their Flash development suite. Yes, certain segments are open source: big whoop, as long as the desktop runtime is closed, they can maintain their control. It's all about control. So no matter how shiny and quick and pretty they make AIR, it remains another boring proprietary trap.

Are people really going to fall for it again? Maybe, but they won't do it for long. Competing platforms will race AIR to the bottom, giving away as much as possible to gain developer mind share. Even Microsoft will eventually give away everything on Silverlight in a desperate bid to regain some sort of relevance in the world of developers under the age of 40. Gnash is catching up with Flash. Can Adobe keep running? Yes, but the question is how far.

So eventually AIR won't slag your Linux machine when you install it, and Adobe will have its cross-platform runtime dream. It'll even work, pretty much (those operating system-specific chrome APIs will be the death of them, I swear). But there is no long-term reason the development community will want to paint itself into this corner: there are just too many attractive options. They're going to have to bow to free software sooner or later, and by delaying the inevitable they're missing an opportunity to gather early, unanimous support.

Adobe AIR blows on Linux

I recently decided I wanted to try out twhirl. Since I'm on Ubuntu Gutsy, twhirl runs on Adobe AIR, I knew it was trouble, but I thought I'd give it a try. After all, I recalled reading about an alpha release of AIR. Okay, so I got what I asked for.

So first off, twhirl doesn't work. After installing AIR (which actually wasn't too bad, despite "chmod 777" instructions that would murder a newbie). The webpage-embedded install wouldn't work. So I gave up.

Then, two days later, I try to open an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet (.ODS). Adobe AIR hijacked the .ODS extension! I can't open my spreadsheet? What the FUCK?!? So I right-clicked on my file, went to Properties, Open With, and added OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet. That should work, right? Wrong-o. This thing hijacked the mime type for .ODS and made it "Adobe AIR Application". So now I can't open my spreadsheets, because I get this error:
and when I try to open an AIR application it tries to open it in OOo!

Of course, it installed Goddess only knows what binaries on my machine. For all I know I've been rootkitted. I have no clue how to remove it – the release notes have nothing to say on the subject.

I can fix this. I can fix my MIME types and track down and murder the crapware I've infected my machine with. But word to the wise: do NOT install the Adobe AIR alpha on a machine that you want to do actual work with, because it will be fuxored. Just goes to show you the lack of depth of Adobe's understanding of Linux, their limited capability and exposure to the platform. Furthermore, it goes to show they don't understand the free software universe if they're going to hijack the file extension for frigging OOo.

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Here's a fix:

sudo "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils/xdg-mime" uninstall "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/support/AdobeAIR.xml"
sudo gedit "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/support/AdobeAIR.xml"

... remove these three lines:

<magic priority="100">
<match type="string" value="PK\003\004" offset="0"/>
</magic>

then:

sudo "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils/xdg-mime" install --mode system --novendor "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/support/AdobeAIR.xml"

... and you're welcome, Adobe. Maybe you could update those release notes? No? I thought not.

Why write HTML for AIR?

I was trying to figure out why anyone would want to write standards-based web pages specifically for Adobe AIR. I'm not talking about Flash/Flex or ActionScript development, I'm talking about using regular HTML, CSS and Javascript to build a website, but then shoehorning it into the Adobe Flash runtime. Why would anyone want to do this?

The stated reason is to ensure that you are providing a consistent experience across browsers and versions, the WORA promise again, but for real this time. That way you can provide the same crap user experience to all users, disabling their scroll wheel and all that great stuff that Flash provides so "richly". Gag.

No, what this is about is locking down web content: keeping people from right-clicking images and saving them, safeguarding the sacred goodies. But first and foremost: disabling Adblock to make sure the punters see the ads. Keeping the geeks from personalizing your pages with Greasemonkey, and preventing client-side mashups. As collateral damage, keeping the visually impaired or blind from using their accessibility tools. But most of all, maintaining control. Control at any cost!

It's the gospel of control that Adobe has always preached, but a way of applying it to a whole other set of technologies: the ones that have formed a generation of software that enabled freedom of choice and diversity of platforms and spurred the development of the web. Adobe's other gospel of richness means two things: your page looks rich (shiny, high in fat), and Adobe builds a monopoly and a position of control that they can monetize someday. And that would make Adobe rich.

Hot AIR

I went to a promotional tour for Adobe AIR today. The logistics of the event were a disaster: held on the roof of a bar on one of the hottest days of the year, in a room far too small for the number of attendees (crammed in like sweaty pickled herrings), with a weak projector giving an invisible presentation. Why they encouraged people to bring their laptops to an event like that I have no idea... Anyhow, I can forgive a disastrous event, but in this case even the most lavish event wouldn't have turned my head.

AIR promises to finally deliver on the elusive goal of "write once, run everywhere." The approach is to use the ubiquity of the Flash plugin to turn the browser inside out and run the WebKit engine everywhere, so web developers can just target one browser engine. The engine will be able to access OS-specific APIs as well, which makes it not the same everywhere, but never mind that. It also includes SQLite for a local store (just like Google Gears). It is the converse of Google Web Toolkit which abstracts the differences, but runs everywhere; it is similar to Silverlight but with the advantages of hordes of existing Adobe fans.

It is telling that in this effort, like with Flash, their Linux support is an afterthought (just as is "accessibility"). This explains their target market. Modern, freely available web tools allow for effective cross-browser development already, and weaving together a site with Flash and dynamic HTML works for most. But just as a caged animal returns to the cage after being freed, the Adobe faithful will gladly accept their shackles again and pay for access to AIR that others breathe for free.

Microsoft follows Adobe to open source

Microsoft has (not quite yet) announced that it will release source for Silverlight, following Adobe's recent move with Flex. Since Microsoft is only planning to support Windows and Mac for the runtime, Adobe has a slight advantage with the huge, lucrative Linux market [har]. Adobe's big advantage is that they are two years ahead and not Microsoft. Microsoft's big advantage is [er, wait, give me a minute, I'm sure I'll think of something... oh!] they 0wn your Windows box and can nuke the Flash player from orbit with Windows Update [diabolical laughter here]. They can't do that, though... it'd piss off their customers, and I guess they care (though they have a hard time showing it).

No Flash player on amd64 linux

The Adobe Flash player is only available in 32-bit binaries for Linux. Because the Flash player is proprietary, you can't fix this yourself. Although Adobe has released the Flex libraries under the MPL, that doesn't do us much good if we can't actually run anything. There's a petition circulating with over 10k signatures asking Adobe to flip a switch and fix this. No youtube on my living room TV unless I reinstall with a cramped 32-bit OS. Update: turns out you can install a 32-bit version of Firefox and the 32-bit flash player, or use ndispluginwrapper. Either way, it's a pain in the ass. Come on, Adobe, get with the program.

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Update:

This is now available as flashplugin-nonfree in the universe repository on Ubuntu. It works, too. Thanks Adobe.

Adobe Flex now open source

I hadn't paid much attention to Adobe's Flex, but the announcement that Adobe is releasing the Flex libraries under the Mozilla Public License caught my attention. Instead of being a boring proprietary play for developers to work on Flash, this is a rather arousing engagement of the open source world.

The promise of Flex, as part of the Apollo Project, is that it will be a platform-independent development platform for Web 2.0-style applications with rich UI, no installation footprint (for applications, obviously not for the Flash player) and, perhaps most interestingly, disconnected use scenarios.

Currently there's no way to make your AJAX applications work offline. Yes, you can get halfway there, but once you lose your browser state you lose your work. So if you disconnect you'd better not lose power until you connect again. This is a real barrier, as anyone who works in online applications knows. Browser developers and others are working on solutions for this, which is essentially the last mile for full Web 2.0 adoption.

So, the MPL is a fascinating choice of licenses. It gives Adobe the advantages of a weak copyleft to keep a commercial developer from stealing their cookies, but still allows software developers to ship their product without giving up their own code.

Before you go thinking that Adobe has gone all communist on us, they are not talking about open-sourcing the Flash player. That may not matter too much, as the Flash player is now available on the three top platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) but it does keep it from spreading to unexpected platforms like Symbian or BSD or whatever. As far as a mixed licensing model goes, it's kind of the converse of what Sun did with Java (GPL runtime and compiler, proprietary libraries).

My guess is that Adobe plans to follow the gold rush business model and get rich on the tools, much as they did with Adobe Acrobat. It's a departure for them, as their core customer base has never been geeky Windows or Unix developers but instead tattooed and pierced cool kids who develop websites on their Macs. They're losing their grip on the PDF market, and I guess this is their way to strike out into a blue ocean. (Apologies for further propagating that cliché.)