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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."
In a battle between two vendors, one with a closed source, insecurt framework and the other with a closed platform, which side do I root for?
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Suing Apple is a NEGATIVE action and is not going to get you anywhere. Instead you can hit Apple in other ways. For example, why not take a POSITIVE action and port your software to Linux, providing those of us who rely on your software a great alternative to supporting this ass hole run company.
Louis Gerbarg has written up a very good explanation of the issues involved.
Quote:
Adobe is a large company with a significant, and complicated, relationship with Apple. They have frequent high level contacts and meetings. Adobe has known for quite some time about Apple's desire not to have Flash on the iPhone. There is no doubt in my mind that if they asked Apple to bless this they were rebuffed, and if they didn't ask the only reason they didn't was because they knew Apple would say no. In either event, they announced the product to their customers and sold them on an idea they were not in a position to deliver, hoping Apple would be unwilling to piss off developers by not fulfilling Adobe's promises. They tried to force Apple's hand by putting Apple in a position where in order stop the Flash they would have to do it publicly in front of Adobe's users. That was a bad call on Adobe's part.
Read the whole thing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What grounds are they suing under? Breach of contract? Why should Apple be forced to use Adobe's stuff if they don't want to?
Free Martian Whores!
I suspect that this isn't about supporting Flash as much as it is about Apple's not allowing linker-level Flash ports. There are good reasons to not allow Flash on the iDevices, it's much harder to make the case for Flash apps that have been converted to stand alone applications.
Adobe failed to keep their promise to provide a (first) free (then low-cost) license for Display PostScript (which was mostly written by NeXT so that Apple had to revise their Rhapsody OS plan (which included a free run-time license for Windows), delaying Apple's then much-needed new OS and opening the crack which became Carbon.
This cost users of Apple's new OS:
- nxhosting .eps graphics .ps files
- automatic display of
- easy previewing of
- automatic previewing of PostScript fills and stroke effects
and nifty applications like PasteUp.app which depended on such.
They have a platform worth billions. Tens of billions. They have chosen to make it closed. You as a consumer can chose to use there platform or not, that is up to you. For them, to potentially put the fate of a multi-billion dollar product in the potential hands of a company that makes development content for this multi-billion dollar platform and not control it is suicide.
You can argue the merits of closed or open but in this case the point is moot. iPhone is closed and Apple wants it that way. They are not going to put their fate in the hands of Adobe. The only legs Adobe may have to stand on is if they were lead to believe that their platform was to be accepted (written contract or verbal) and then at the 11th hour to be shafted? Well then maybe they have a case.
Hey, I was the engineering dept. manager back at VLSI Tech back when chip sets was a good business. Intel decided, rightly so, that they could not put the fate of their CPU's in the hands of 3rd party chip set vendors. In ONE product cycle (after they finally figured out how to make them) they took 90% of the PC market with their chip sets. Did it hurt? Yea, it hurt. We went from $250M/yr to $25M/yr in 12 months. I lost my job along with a host of others. That being said, I still can't fault Intel for what they did. Quite frankly I'm surprised it took them as long as it did. The case in point with Apple and Adobe is no different.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
*Sigh* So when you bought your iPod Touch did it not say Windows PC or Mac OS X only right? It was fairly clear on my box that there was no Linux support.
No there's no technical reason. Just practical ones. Apple doesn't want to support Linux. Many companies don't. That's their choice. You changing your OS is not the responsibility of Apple.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It is simple. Flash crap is everywhere wether you want it or not. But it is trivial to get a non-iPhone phone.
So I am with Apple 100% on this. Flash has to die and die horribly.
They really got themselves to blame. Apple is just paying them back for the years Adobe did not support Flash on Apple OS/Hardware.
If Apple can kill Flash, it killed a dependency on a 3rd party provided who determines what you can and cannot do.
Quick test: If I launch a 128 bit CPU that is completely different from x86 or ARM, then will Adobe support it? No of course not. But Apple might want to do something like that one day, and it then doesn't want to have to beg Adobe to please release flash for their new product.
Apple already has enough problems with MS products not running on its OS, it doesn't want an endless number of 3rd party providers that can screw a product launch.
Doubt it? What killed Vista? Lack of 3rd party support with drivers. Why does MS still have to support 32 and 16 bit? 3rd party software vendors.
Right now, Apple can do whatever it wants with its platforms and screw any slow ass 3rd party provider.
And of course, they don't have to worry about the endless security holes in Flash or its piss poor coding standards that can bring a desktop PC to its knees, let alone a mobile phone.
Flash die!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm not being mindlessly dismissive here, but what does Adobe seek to gain here? To sway the hearts and minds of a handful of pundits while Steve Jobs rolls out products that make HTML5 development attractive?
This part is redundant, but needs to be asked, why is Adobe not fixing flash? Is it cheaper to litigate and wage a PR war than it is to fix the damn browser plugin and development tools?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
haha, so true. I actually support Adobe on this one. If people want flash, give them flash, I personally will stick to HTML5. But we should still have the option....
How the hell can one company require another company to use their products? Apple wants only things written in a certain language, and that can't be used to re-execute additional code, etc etc, to be installed. Have we already forgotten /Launch from pdfs, a week later? And flash itself allows additional, non-Apple-approved, code to be run. That's the point...whether or not you or I like the policy, it's not as though Adobe is being singled out. They just feel like they are because they have such crap products that are near-monopolies themselves.
"How can you shut us out!!! We would have had our monopoly locked down if not for you...and now people are all abuzz about html5 instead! You bastards!" Yeah, I don't see how that's a legally binding thing. Ford can decide that they won't install Pioneer radios in their cars...what legal grounds would Pioneer have to suing them in to forcing them to use their product? Especially if Pioneer radios somehow broke a policy that Ford has (such as - no apps that can be used to write new apps that can be run).
My first though (after a brief "Sue them for what?") is that perhaps Apple should attempt a take over of Adobe. Adobe has plenty of good pro apps that would go great along side Apples pro apps.
But then I think back to what I know from having worked with Adobe. Its a highly bloated organization, not run in a very efficient manner. Their authoring tools are great, but a lot of what made them a great company doesn't seem to be there anymore. The project that I worked on with them was very poorly conceived, poorly executed and was already on its third or fourth iteration (none of them ever went anywhere beyond the pilot program I worked on).
For Apple, buying adobe could be too much of a drag, they would want them to be a subsidiary but the changes they would have to make to streamline to corporation could be more than Apple would want to bite off.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Consider the possibility that Flash (or Monotouch) becomes the dominant development platform for the iDevice. Aside from resource issues (a Monotouch 'hello world' on the iPhone is a 5mb file while an objective C version is 50 kb (see this thread) and the impact that could have on multitasking (being able to run fewer apps), look at the features the framework offers.
So, lets say that Apple releases firmware 5.0 next year with a bunch of new features and 75% of the apps are written in flash How long will it be before these apps can take advantage of the new firmware? The answer is - when Adobe gets around to releasing a new version. So there is an iPhone with all these new features that the consumer can't use... and Adobe is waiting to get the android or windows phone up to a similar level so it can release something that can again target all the devices. This isn't a good situation for Apple to be in.
Another thing to consider is if a new firmware release exposes a bug in the runtime libraries that are brought in. Now you upgrade the firmware, and a majority of apps on your iDevice crash. Who does this reflect badly upon? Apple and the developer... and yet Apple can't go and fix a bug in a third party runtime and the developer has to wait until there is a new release from Adobe.
In these situations it is Adobe (or Novell) that will control the iDevice experience - not Apple. That is just not something Apple wants to let have happen.