Flash, Flex, Open Source?

(Via Alex Russell’s blog I came across Mike Shaver’s “Being Open About Being Closed,” which is an excellent discussion of Adobe’s positioning of the Flash player and Flex in Top 10 Adobe Flex Misconceptions.

As Mike points out, the fact that the Tamarin is an open source project, and that various people in the community have over time deciphered the SWF file format, does not make Flash anything other than a proprietary product.

In many of the presentations I give about rich Internet applications, I use a slide which looks something like this:

It’s intended to communicate two key concepts:

1. There are a huge number of mature, professional open source toolkits and frameworks for building RIAs.
2. There is strong pressure on proprietary, closed, commercial toolkits and frameworks in this space to open up, at least in terms of source code visibility and modifiability, if not in terms of redistribution.

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