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Will Adobe Sue Apple Over Flash?
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's iron-bound determination to keep Adobe Flash out of any iWhatever device is about to blow up in Apple's face. Sources close to Adobe tell me that Adobe will be suing Apple within a few weeks."
This reminds me of a line from a movie...
"But in the Iran-Iraq war you sold guns to both sides."
"Did you ever consider that I wanted both sides to lose?"
We should be pointing out more reasons for the guys to sue each other than just a petty Flash dispute, we should arm them with the means to sue each other into oblivion!
Than, if my calculations are correct, the lawyers will have made enough to buy new yachts, bolstering the economy slightly. It's really a win for everybody all around.
"It was Microsoft's operating system." Oh, right, I forgot, under modern antitrust laws you're allowed to be a total anti-competitive asshole until you become the 800lb gorilla. Part of me is hoping that Adobe wins and takes Apple to the cleaners because I don't buy the hypocrisy here that Apple should be able to get away with behavior that would have launched an online World War 3 if done by Microsoft.
Personally I'd think that Adobe standing up for itself, and perhaps threatening Apple with some-sort of discontinuing of it's products on Macs may knock some sense into Apple; it'd probably be a good thing for Adobe in the long run.
If Apple obviously doesn't want to play nice with Adobe, why should Adobe keep providing Apple with a main selling feature of Macs? (The supposed fact they're for multimedia work).
This is actually a "story"?
It's literally some anonymous guy on the internet saying something.
There's no information. These are anonymous sources close to an anonymous coward. Don't take it any more seriously than graffiti on the bathroom wall.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Can Microsoft do that as well? It's their platform right? Oh, wait, it's Apple so it's fine now.
I don't know who should win in this one. Perhaps I'll wait till the docs are actually filed and can read the actual arguments and get actual law instead of some journalists opinion on what is.
The one with the closed source, insecure framework.
On an open platform, you are free to kick software vendors you don't like to the curb, in favor of ones you do, and in a granular fashion. On a closed platform, your decision is entirely deprived of granularity. It's a take-it-or-leave-it, all of it, thing.
In practice, the latter gives you much less power as a customer. Yes, you can not buy the closed platform; but that means that you cannot have any of it. Technologically bundled. On an open platform, you can pick and choose. Bundling(whether technological or contractual, and whether or not it meets the legal standards of Sherman) gives the vendor great power over you because, as long as one part of their product is good, they can be more or less assured that you will just have to suck down the bad parts. Open platforms, which are much less subject to bundling, barring particularly nasty contracts, subject individual parts of the system to competitive pressure.
Yes, flash sucks. Don't install it if you have the choice, use flashblock and a whitelist if you just need it in a few places; but never forget that the vendor who can choose for you, even if their taste is impeccable, is more dangerous than the vendor you can choose, even if they suck.
Although I'm not going to argue that flash is extremely stable, I think this is much more about platform lock-in than any particular defect in Flash.
Apple didn't ban Flash, they banned anything that wasn't written specifically for their platform.
Adobe could release an absolutely amazing and flawless version of Flash 11 tomorrow and it would be just as banned, if not even more zealously, because it would represent a stronger competitor to Apple's own platform.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Not to mention telling Apple "No, we're not going to port Photoshop to Yellow box (even though it's based on our Display Postscript technology)". It was a nasty one-two punch that could have put Apple out of business.
*Sigh* The rules change when you are a monopoly. MS has a monopoly. But that isn't the where they got into trouble because it's legal have a monopoly. It's illegal to use your monopoly powers to limit and thwart competition. That's where MS got into trouble.
Apple does not have a monopoly on smart phones. They don't even have the biggest marketshare in the US much less the world. RIM has the lead. Therefore monopoly rules do not apply.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
What's stopping Adobe from porting Flash to iPhone, iPad, iPod?
Oh wait, they would have to make it not suck.
Flash is cool. I too have played some great flash games. But when my system goes from idle to 100% and all I did was open a web page with a flash based add, something is wrong. Why does something that takes up no more than a tenth of the web page cause my system to go to 100% cpu?
Everyone thinks Apple is the big bad wolf here. The reality is, Adobe has every opportunity to port flash and make it an outstanding piece of software. Instead they want to settle for good enough. Good enough is what has given us software that works, but requires ever increasing amounts of processor power, memory and disk space just to run at an acceptable level.
Processor, memory and more importantly battery life, are not unlimited in a mobile device. Apple is the gatekeeper so yes it does appear that they are the bad guys, but the reality is that Adobe has had every opportunity to make Flash better. Make it use less CPU, less memory and make it world class software. Instead, they've chosen to whine and complain about it.
Did Opera whine and complain about Apple's rules and how it was going to hurt them? Or did they innovate?
Adobe has every opportunity to make Flash function so well that Apple would have no problem letting it exist on the iProducts. Apple has provided the tools to write code for the iPlatforms. Adobe has access to those tools just like everyone else. The only thing stopping Adobe is Adobe. Apple has no further responsibility to make some other companies product work.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
Apple is the one pushing people toward HTML5 video
"Monopoly" depends a lot on scope.
If we're considering the entire software industry, no, Apple doesn't have a "monopoly". But neither does anyone else at the moment. Neither did Microsoft in the 1990s and early 2000s.
If we're talking about the smartphone market, Apple still doesn't have a "monopoly". Likewise, Microsoft didn't and doesn't have a monopoly in the personal computer market.
If we're talking about the iPhone/iPad market, then Apple does indeed have a "monopoly". This scope is equivalent to that of the x86 PC market. It's a specific type of device, made by a relatively small number of manufacturers.
Now, you might say that it's nothing like the Microsoft monopoly of the x86 PC market. In reality, however, they're very similar situations. In fact, Apple's monopoly is much worse than Microsoft's ever was. Microsoft only ever directly controlled the software. Apple, on the other hand, controls the software, the hardware, and the distribution channel.
Even if Microsoft used their position to encourage the use of IE, they never went out of their way to explicitly "ban" Netscape Navigator, or Opera, or any other competing browser from running on Windows. Apple, on the other hand, has imposed very strict limitations on the apps that can run on their devices.
I'm sickened by Microsoft's products and behavior as much as any other reasonable person, but Apple has taken it to a new level that I don't think even Microsoft could ever achieve.
I think it's a no brainer. Support Adobe.
Then, maybe, someone will attack Adobe about their platform.
When that happens, support them.
Remember...the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Anti-Trust laws are not exclusive to monopolies.
Quite simply, any anti-competitive behavior may be grounds for an anti-trust case under section 1 of the Sherman act. It could certainly be construed that allowing a specific application constitutes an agreement between Apple and the applications developers, and that if Apple refuses to allow Flash-based alternatives to that application that it then is a conspiracy that restrains competition, and if that application is for sale then this agreement by definition restrains competitive commerce.
"His name was James Damore."
Sometimes laws are complex for useful and legitimate reasons. When the problem domain is a complex beast, the laws governing it are going to be complex. Just like software - complex problems yield complex solutions most of the time. And laws have to deal with things that are far more complicated than software, because software systems are generally deterministic whereas legal systems have to deal with human failings.
For instance, let's take the very simple crime of murder. You'd think it was straightforward - you kill somebody, you go to jail or death row. But it's not, because sometimes killing somebody is justified, sometimes it's an accident, sometimes it's an accident that required the killer to do a whole lot of extraordinarily stupid things, sometimes it's because the person wanted to die, etc. If you make the laws too simple, the judge will be stuck with the sentence for running someone over because your brakes failed (due to poor maintenance) being the same sentence as hiring a hit man to kill someone in their sleep.
In the case of the 1100 page health insurance reform law, it's as big as it is in large part because health care is a hugely difficult problem with both lives and billions of dollars on the line. Yes, there are also a lot of riders, special interest stupidity, loopholes, etc, but you can easily leave 300 pages for that stuff and still have a hugely complex bill.
I am officially gone from
I my applications are "originally written in" in neurons, which requires the use of intermediate code being expressed in various languages on whiteboards, notebooks, conversations, etc. before any code reaches C or other language. I guess I won't be writing any iPhone apps.
Alternatively, i could interpret the clause in the new agreement to mean that they don't want runtime translation/compilation to avoid sucking battery power when (their) tools are available to correctly compile once against the target.
At any rate, I don't imagine that it will be long before someone distributes the Flash player as a bunch of (obfuscated) C classes or libraries or some such (perhaps as an on-line service) which a developer could then paste into Apple's developer tools, along with a byte-code or other pastable representation of the Flash program which would then be compiled by the allowed Apple tools into a native binary.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
They don't have to cut off their software entirely. They can just make their Mac versions half-assed ports of the Windows versions.
Oh, wait, they already did that... Well, they can release them months after the Windows versions.
Oh, wait, they already did that too... Well, they can make them even more half-assed, and maybe kill a few of the smaller apps on the Mac, like Premiere.
Oh, wait, they already did that for a while. Gosh, can't think why Apple isn't more enthusiastic about keeping Adobe happy...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak