Flash Player Open History
DIGG IT!
Published
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
at
7:48 AM
.
There are lots of new people in the world of Flash/Flex, so many in fact that some facts about the evolution of Flash Player are fundamentally misunderstood. Ryan Stewart posted on on open sourcing Flash Player highlights a perspective that I think is generally inaccurate. Ryan states that Adobe will gain "the collective brainpower of a lot of developers" and for me this seems to imply that Flash Player is created in a vacuum in some dark corner of 601 Townsend St. San Francisco. I agree we would learn a ton from developers working in an OSS model but I think it is generally hidden that we work with a ton a developers today, more than most know.The truth is that many business, developers, and interactive designers are deeply involved in the creation and evolution of Flash Player. There are many business and developers that depend on Flash Player for their livelihood and these folks are involved within many aspects of the Flash Player evolution. Actually from Flash Player 4 onward all major player changes have all been developer/customer driven. The core of Flash Player is centered on customer needs, 110%!
How would I know this? I was a Macromedia/Adobe customer for 10 years before joining the Adobe as technical evangelist 11 months ago.
During the creation of Flash Player 6,7,8,9 I was directly involved with several engineers on the Flash Player team as a customer. At the time I was not employed by Macromedia and I was not paid for my work on assisting with Flash Player's evolution. We were provided prototypes of Flash Player 9 that allowed bootstrapping ABC files into the new JIT compiler and were testing the API's in depth. There were many changes to Flash Player that came directly from this group. I wrote several applications including a 2D tile engine in AS3 and worked with a very low level build of Flex in AS3. I recall being very vocal about the fact that index and depth were seemingly backwards from AVM1 to AVM2. Poof...next build it was flipped to the way it is today. I was not alone, many of the best minds in Flash/Flex were involved at this level but their silence rests under a stack of NDAs. The people involved in Flash Player development outside of Adobe are not allowed to talk about their involvement.
First rule is Fight Club is do not talk about Fight Club!
This gives a perception that Flash Player is developed by Adobe independent of everyone else. This could not be further from the truth. Our customers are deeply involved at every turn of Flash Player evolution. From compatibility to feature requests customers are king in regards to player changes, that has been true for over 10 years and remains so today.
Given this is not the same as Open Source but the perspective that external developers are not deeply involved in Flash Player evolution is completely false. Actually the Flash Player team was openly at 360Flex talking with 100's of developers about the next version of Flash Player, Flash Player 10.
There is also another factor. Flash Player development is rocket science! If you have deep skills in assembly and can implement features under extreme size constraints, then Flash Player team is the place for you. There are very few who can do it, very few. Maybe opening the player adds value at this extreme level but player internals are very sophisticated. Implementing a cross-platform JIT in under 100Kb is extreme programming and making sure that the release is compatible with over 10 years of SWF files is the mount everest of programming. Kudos to the Player Team, I am not worthy!!!
I do agree with Ryan that some aspects of the player should be open source, then again some aspects already are. We donated the brain of Flash Player to Mozilla as open source in the Tamarin project. The JIT ECMA4 runtime will power Javascript in FireFox and all enhancements will be shared among the OS participants.
Long post short, customers are involved at every turn of Flash Player's evolution.
Could we be more open?
Yes.
Will it happen overnight?
No. Making dramatic changes like open sourcing Flash Player has implications to a very large group of companies and developers. It would be a mistake to rush a decision when there is an important ecosystem in the balance.
Cheers,
Ted :)