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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?
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Adobe's in this position because Flash is the #1 cause of application crashes on the Mac. If they hadn't been foot-dragging for the last decade or so, flash would be something Apple actually wanted.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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.
Adobe is going to sue for what?
Company A doesn't want to use technology developed by company B. Good luck with that.
Granted, Apple is quite aggressive and loud when it comes to Flash but that is still no reason to sue them for not using it. Their device, their technology.
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
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!
What exactly are they going to sue them for? Is there a law that says a company has to allow another company's product to interact with theirs? I mean, sure, its generally considered good form to do so, but its hardly required. Of course, rising popularity of iPhone/iPod Touch/possibly the iPad as well, none of which run Flash, means that there will be less demand to use Flash, and therefore Adobe will be able to sell fewer Flash dev kits. Well, frankly, too bad. Adobe makes some good stuff, and is probably largely responsible for the success of the Mac, but as Apple moves more towards the mobile space, they don't really need Adobe as much as they used to anymore. But, as Apple continues to push the market space away from the desktop, Adobe may need Apple more than ever.
This is actually a "story"?
It's literally some anonymous guy on the internet saying something.
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.
I rtfa, (crazy, I know) and don't understand on what grounds the suing will occur. I understand why Adobe is pissed off, but is Apple really in an actionable position? They own the SDK, the hardware, everything, they can do whatever the fuck they want. While this might not make them popular and people might not buy their shit, how is it that Adobe can sue them because Apple said they couldn't come over and play in the walled garden?
Granted, ianal (but neither is Jack Thompson!) but I am just totally baffled as to what grounds the alleged suit is being brought on.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
Come on, people!
Apple is telling developers that they aren't free to choose the tools they use. Specifically you can't use a tool that would allow you to write code once and run it on any platform. Who cares about Adobe, Apple is telling *you* to take it up the ass and like it.
And there are people in Slashdot that are ok with that?
GTFO.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Agreed. And, to be blunt, I'm sick and tired of flash all over my Internet. Flash cookies are a HORRIBLE idea. Menus on websites that are flash driven are ridiculous. And to be blunt, the vast majority of flash on the sites I frequent are the ads anyway. Especially when I'm on a low-bandwidth connection, why the hell do I want flash anyway?
I know, I know, without flash I can't watch a movie on the Internet anymore. So let's adopt HTML 5 standards and get on with it.
----- Connection reset by beer
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hah. Hahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Use our product! On your product! Without paying us! Or we'll sue you!
What next? Microsoft suing a suddenly popular PC manufacturer because they've completely abandoned Windows and only ship with Ubuntu Linux, or an "advanced" option out of a list of free OSes including Fedora, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD?
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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.
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
Yep, I was in the same boat. I now just use a Cowon D2+ instead since it plays nice with pretty much everything via both USB-MSC and MTP.
I wouldn't call it sabotage, just incompetence. Apple's been telling them to fix it for quite a few years, but it seems that they can't be bothered to learn the rudiments of how to write threaded code.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Apple is perfectly within their rights to not allow programs that will then run arbitrary code on their devices. No court would uphold this and im sure Apples lawyers have already done a preliminary job of putting together a case if this were to happen.
IANAL but it seems pretty airtight that Apple can decide arbitrarily what to run -on their own devices- especially when there are literally millions of phones/platforms that will let you do anything. Did Adobe really think Flash was going to be on top forever? Pretty shortsighted for a tech company if they did. With all the new ossum features in HTML5 why is anyone complaining that Apple is replacing a proprietary format with an open one anyways?
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
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
When Apple entered the phone market, there were a number of entrenched competitors already in place. Even so, the iPhone has manage to hit what, 25% market share?
When Apple entered the portable music player market, there were a number of weaker competitors. It was the first affordable, viable, and stable digital player available. They now enjoy a 75% market share.
Now that Apple has entered the super-portable PC market, there are virtually no meaningful competitors. They are almost guaranteed a significant market share, even if their batteries start exploding. If they see market share in the super-portable arena like they do in the portable music player arena, you can bet that there will be a fair bit of scrutiny that comes down on the App Store.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The EU measures against Microsoft were based on them being a de-facto monopoly, something you can't possibly say of Apple.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
*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.
I wouldn't call it sabotage, just incompetence. Apple's been telling them to fix it for quite a few years, but it seems that they can't be bothered to learn the rudiments of how to write threaded code.
-jcr
But if it works on Linux and Windows, on the exact same hardware, how is this entirely Adobe's problem?
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 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.
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.
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