Lessig preaches openness to Flash faithful

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Can't agree with Lessig about Flash ...

I've listened to several of his lectures and generally agree with what Mr. Lessig has to say, but I can't really agree with him about Flash and the .swf format.

For one thing, as the article notes, SWF is an open format, meaning any entity - closed source, open source, for-profit, volunteer, what-have-you - is free to create an IDE that creates and publishes SWF content, or a runtime that renders it. Swishzone, Electric Rain, Adobe, etc., have all done this. Macromedia got there first, invested quite a lot in the technology, and happens to produce the best IDE at the moment, that's all. There are websites dedicated to showcasing the variety of SWF tools available.

In response to Mr. Lessig's (paraphrased) point that "proprietary platforms like Flash had a rightful place on the Internet, but that developers of such technologies ought to loosen restrictions on their creative property", the implication that Flash developers hold a tight reign on their source files doesn't really hold water if you look at the Flash community. Try doing a websearch for ".fla" (the flash source code file format) using any search engine and see how many results it returns. From the more rudimentary stuff like tweening symbols, to more advanced stuff like appplying design patterns to object-oriented ActionScript, there are more open-source Flash files on the internet than any one person could ever possibly get through.

Finally, in response to Mr. Lessig's (again paraphrased) point that "Macromedia should study the explosive growth of HTML, which created a vast community of Web developers by allowing them to 'steal' from one another and expand on each other's work" ... again, there gigabytes of open-source Flash out there. More to the point though, comparing a compiled format like SWF to a human-legible mark-up language like HTML is a bit like apples and oranges; but for that matter, why not compare Flash to PHP, which has enjoyed "explosive growth" in spite of the fact that the source code is never even sent to the browser?

Joseph Friedman

Posted by: Joseph Friedman   Posted on: 04/07/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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