Flash Gets Branded "The Enemy"

RewiredRewired Member
edited April 2005 in Science & Tech
Copyright reformer and silicon.com Agenda Setter Lawrence Lessig gave Flash developers an earful yesterday about how their platform of choice is perceived in the free software world.
"Flash is the enemy," said Lessig, a Stanford University professor and board member of the Free Software Foundation, as he described the opinions of leading free- and open-source-software advocates. These advocates "hate Flash," he said.

Macromedia's Flash animation software - .swf - has long had an open file format. That means that other developers can create software tools that produce Flash content.

But the technology itself remains under Macromedia's proprietary control. And unlike HTML, which lets anyone inspect a web page's underlying source code, Flash movies keep that information under wraps.

On that note, Lessig said 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 others' work, as compared with the less spectacular growth of Apple Computer's AppleScript scripting language, which hides its code.
Source: silicon.com
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