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Adobe Founders On Flash and Internet Standards
An anonymous reader points out an 18-month-old interview with the founders of Adobe (and creators of PostScript) Charles Geschke and John Warnock, and highlights three interesting quotes from the book Masterminds of Programming that seem very timely now. "'It is so frustrating that this many years later we're still in an environment where someone says if you really want this to work you have to use Firefox. The whole point of the universality of the Web would be to not have those kind of distinctions, but we're still living with them. It's always fascinating to see how long it takes for certain pieces of historical antiquity to die away. The more you put them in the browsers you've codified them as eternal, and that's stupid. ... With Flash what we're trying to do is both beef it up and make it robust enough so that at least you can get one language that's platform-independent and will move from platform to platform without hitting you every time you turn around with different semantics. ... You can see why, to a certain extent, Apple and Microsoft view that as a challenge because they would like you to buy into their implementation of how the seamless integration with the Web goes. What we're saying is it really shouldn't matter. That cloud ought to be accessible by anybody's computer and through any sort of information sitting out on the Web."
Shhh.
Adobe is busy wetting themselves over someone else monopolising important tech toys. Don't disturb them.
It'd be entertaining if it hasn't been holding back the free web for so long. Look how much energy people have put into "flashifying" the web. Sad really.
Now what commercial gain could they possibly get from doing this? BSD/Linux makeup maybe 1% of multi-purpose computer users. Web content developers make up a fraction of a fraction of that. Also consider the fact that all web content developers have to have a windows machine around to proof for the ubiquitous "IE" that still makes up the lions share of the browser market.
Linux/BSD are great solutions but they are currently niche software for geeks and servers.
Microsoft is terrified by anything that would let it's locked-in customer base easily migrate to another desktop OS. Apple doesn't care so much.
Are you kidding? Both are as bad as each other, MS is being forced to allow people to choose things like browsers, Apple on the other hand are happily locking your into their tightly controlled products.
Not sure why this was modded flame post. Adobe said the same thing to all of us in their post. Someone fix this poor guys rating. The story says fuck you people of the internet, use flash or die. (I know I paraphrased). This nice fellow responds "Fuck You!", kind of a right-back-at-you not flamebait...
Yes, but the "Microsoft is terrified... Apple doesn't care so much." kinda ruined his point and turned it into a Microsoft are evil, Apple are good post. Apple get a lot of good publicity, and people love to hate Microsoft, but I fail to see how they are anything but two sides of the same coin. Other than that it's an interesting post.