Goodbye my friend, it’s hard to die: Part 2 – Flex goes open source

Adobe returns with another shocking news: Flex, another Flash product, goes open source. It will be continued by the Apache Foundation. While this might be a smart move, it clearly signals Adobe’s intentions to move out of the Flash ecosystem.

Once the only platform that allowed use to write once, run anywhere, the Flash ecosystem had several great tools:

the Flash Player – usually an Active X browser plug-in or a simple plug-in for any browser.

the mobile Flash Player – the mobile version of the player.

the Adobe Flash editor – the tool that allowed you to author Flash content and create swf files

Flex – an Eclipse-based Rich Internet Applications (RIA) editor that offered controls similar to those used to author desktop applications

Flash Catalyst – a tool for creating advanced GUIs for RIA

Flash Media Server – a server for delivering media content

DRM and codecs – were necessary to deliver video through Flash

A series of products like Flash Paper and others

A series of Flash-like products, decompilers, and RIA tools inspired by Flash which are used to output content into swf files.

Now that at least 2 major components are discontinued, the faith of the whole ecosystem is in doubt. This can be the beginning of the end for the Flash ecosystem, but for all the programmers who worked with Flash, the time is not lost. Many of the features introduced in HTML 5 were inspired by Flash, so this new technology is not only the deathly enemy of Flash, but also it’s true heir. If you ever wondered why HTML 5 it’s called like that since most of the new features are in JavaScript, rather than in the new HTML 5 tags, than you are already in the HTML 5 developer’s club and you know that the most important part of the new specs is JavaScript which was the basis for Flash’s ActionScript (as ECMAScript specification).

Goodbye my friend, it’s hard to die – The Death of Mobile Flash

It’s almost one week and it’s hard to realize that the inevitable eventually happened. And it happened sooner than many would have tought it would happen. It was just common sense that in order to escape from mobile development hell, one would have dump the may platforms like Flash, J2ME, and so on, and focus on a single platform: HTML 5. Of course we are only talking about development packages here, not about operating systems, but the thinking should be the same: when having to deal with thousands of devices and configurations, it’s best to keep things simple and open-source. This is the single most important reason why HTML 5 won the hearts of many so fast.

Adobe took this decision in order to focus on mobile HTML 5. They already made a Flash like interface for one of their products: Edge. Adobe Edge has all the bells and whistles that once belonged to Flash: elements, object, stage, timelines, triggers, events, transitions, etc, all of them implemented in native JavaScript. It’s not too late for them to win this market. In fact if done right, Edge has the chance to provide the same web domination Adobe used to have with Flash several years ago. It’s just that unlike Flash in the early 2000s, this tool has a lot of competition from simple libraries like JQuery (which it already integrates quite nicely), D3, Popcorn, and many others. But by far, from a developer’s point of view, the biggest competitor is one that has not yet been released, and it’s not really focused on animations: Yahoo! Mojito, a tool that allows you to write the same code for server and client, a promise that is still the Grail for web applications, even tough it’s already several decades old. The Write Once, Run Anywhere has been the Java mantra for almost two decades, but Flash was the only technology to provide it for real. Today, by giving the mobile Flash the axe, Adobe will join a dying Yahoo! in the quest for the new web domination.

The Issue of Intellectual Property and The Free Culture

Motto: “From the earliest days at Apple, I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, we’d be out of business. If it weren’t protected, there’d be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there’s a simpler reason: It’s wrong to steal. It hurts other people. And it hurts your own character.” (Steve Jobs, as quoted in the biography by Walter Isaacson)
We are safe to assume that Bill Gates has the same philosophy when it comes to Intellectual Property for the simple fact that he made a fortune from IP. And many other Internet or media moguls do. The issue is not however as simple as Jobs described it for the simple fact that the Internet changed all the rules of the game when it comes to IP in some spaces.

Culture and Entertainment. In the cultural spaces, for example, the assumption from which most people start when they consume culture today is that culture should be free. Free open-air concerts, pirate websites and free content available on the Internet have created an idea in people’s minds that anything related to culture should be free. While in theory we can agree with this, there will always be the question of who’s paying the creators? Creating quality content takes time, talent, and dedication. The authors might have spent maybe years trying to create something valuable, but they are not able to cash. The solution is never free culture. It also can not come in the form of overpayment. How many of the movies you have seen lately were worth the price of admission? Regardless of the quality most of the DVDs cost almost the same. Let’s examine the case of the movies a little bit. I’ve just checked for some prices on the street and on-line and guess what I found? The last asian gore, a classic Dolph Lundgren feature, a simple chick flick and the last Tarantino costs the same. While this might be good news for somebody collecting movies in huge quantities regardless of the genre, in general it’s just a fact that helps the piracy even more, because some of the afore-mentioned movies might be of interest for purchasing just for the fans. Renting them on or offline is the usual solution, but it doesn’t solve the problem. The solution is deceptively simple: change the pricing and purchasing options. But how? Charging for quality is subjective (you never know how much somebody would pay for a certain movie) and also against the free culture mantra by all means, even tough it’s common practice (please check the pricing for the movies that won Oscars against those who haven’t, what do you notice?). This will remain an open problem, but purchasing options are definitely changing: from iTunes to Amazon and Hulu, entertainment and culture are available through all channels. We will not dive further into the pricing problem that is faced by the entertainment industry now. We will explore it with another occasion. One thing is clear: the desire for Free Culture and the mass adoption of piracy was not the public saying that they don’t want to pay for something, but rather the public saying that they are tired to eat crappy content and to search for years for certain albums or movies for the simple fact that the entertainment giant refuses to re-edit them. In certain countries where the payment was low and there was also a cultural gap (see former communist countries, for example) piracy flourished because publishing giants were ignorant when it came to their countries.
What happens to the software industry? Be warned that industry people and common people might understand different things through free software. As defined by Richard Stallman, Free Software is open software, software that comes with the code, but not really unpaid software. If you want you can have free software for which you pay. How does this sounds? Counterintuitive for sure. Free software is also software offered for free legally, software for which you don’t pay money. And of course, while we don’t like it, illegal software is also free, but nobody responds for it. Now here lies the true value: who responds for this software? Who responds if this software ruins my computer? If nobody does it, then you shouldn’t be using it because you don’t know if it’s safe to use it.
Intellectual Property at its strongest: Patents. Well this year was all about patents. Every major company had to fight at least a dozen process against patent trolls, but also against other major companies. It seems like nobody plays fair anymore. Without patents there will be no protection for new ideas, on one side, but also no source of income for inventors. And as we noticed already, it takes time and money to do something well. Patents are the real engine of the economy. They stimulate competition. Without them we will all be a bunch of copy/pasters, reduced to what the establishment already offers us, without any real capacity to bring disruptive ideas to the market. And yet even leading companies choose to eliminate it from their practices. We should all consider a patent as a recognition of his creator, an homage, as well as a guide to the invention.
Free Culture or Fear Culture? Free Culture is a recipient for disaster in any space. Can you image tourism thriving in a world of Free Culture? Not really. There is however a thriving fear culture that prospers in the shadow of Free Culture, a Fear Culture, a culture of people that are so scared by new ideas that they prefer to steal instead of experiment.