Flash Is Not a Right

medcalf notes that game designer Ian Bogost enters the debate about Flash by saying "[A] large number of developers seem to think that they have the right to make software for the iPhone (or for anything else) in Flash, or in another high-level environment of their choosing. Literally, the right, not just the convenience or the opportunity. And many of them are quite churlish about the matter. This strikes me as a very strange sort of attitude to adopt. There's no question that Flash is useful and popular, and it has a large and committed user base. There's also no question that it's often convenient to be able to program for different platforms using environments one already knows. And likewise, there's a long history of creating OS stubs or wrappers or other sorts of gizmos to make it possible to run code 'alien' to a platform in a fashion that makes it feel more native. But what does it say about the state of programming practice writ large when so many developers believe that their 'rights' are trampled because they cannot write programs for a particular device in a particular language? Or that their 'freedom' as creators is squelched for the same reason?"

Comments

Re:Provided...

[geekboybt]

You can download the SDK for free, legally, from http://developer.apple.com/, and use the emulator all you want for $0.00. It costs you $99/year to get a certificate to put the code on your device.

Re:Two senses of "closed."

[DRJlaw]

Just keep this in mind: Apple used Fairplay DRM to kill the use of WMA and DRM in the music industry. Apple's insanity isn't all bad.

Apple also refused to license Fairplay DRM, which ment that the music that you puchased from iTunes could only realistically be played on Apple devices (Quicktime/Itunes on a PC is not a significant exception). WMA DRM locked you into certain devices, but not only Microsoft-marketed devices. That insanity is "all bad."

BTW: Fairplay did not kill DRM in the music industry. Amazon killed DRM in the music industry.

Apple changed the rules after the game started

[Comboman]

FALSE. They do have the right, so long as they tell you first and then leave it up to you to decide if you want to play by those rules. You CHOSE to buy Apple fully aware of the restrictions, then blame Apple when those restrictions finally affect you in a negative way.

But that's the problem, they DIDN'T tell me first. They snuck this clause into the EULA of the most recent update. It's a little late in the game to be changing the rules, especially when Adobe invested a lot of time and money into creating an iPhone development tool which followed all of Apple's rules up to that point.

Re:Two senses of "closed."

[drcagn]

No, Apple wanted to not use DRM from the beginning, but the record labels were too afraid to do that (the selling music online industry was in its infancy, especially for the mainstream). Once Apple got too big, it got to call the shots because it controlled the iTunes Music Store (and thus almost all of downloadable music) and the record labels resented that because they wanted to increase prices. The industry only gave way on the DRM issue because they needed to create a competitor to Apple, so they did so by giving Amazon permission for DRM-free distribution. Then Apple negotiated and had a trade-off: they got rights to higher quality files without DRM in exchange for giving the labels the variable pricing scheme that iTunes now has.