I don't understand Nik's point

Nik Cubrilovic discusses todays announcement by Adobe to open source most of what makes up Flex, the framework, compiler, debugger and so on.

He then goes on to tell developers 'not to hold their breath' as the Flash runtime won't be open sourced anytime soon. 

I guess my view here is why would that be good for anyone? Does anyone really want to see a fractured runtime environment as exists with Java on the desktop, where you can't really be sure which Java someone has and how a different version might perform or an application behave in a different manner when using one Java runtime or another

Sure there are some benefits of an open source runtime, but I'd rather have a single common runtime across several operating systems where I can be confident of a consistent experience.

Comments

[Julio Garcia]

You are so right about that!!!! Those of us who still remember the “small” variations that Microsoft did to their Java Virtual Machine on the early Internet Explorer, and how that practically killed Java on the Browser, do not want an open source Flash player. Please NO!!!

[Tom Chiverton]

The problem with Java is there is no easy way to say 'this app requires such and such a version, from such and such a vendor'.
Flash (version >6) already solves the version problem with seamless upgrades (only from v8, I think), and could be extended to include vendor information too.
Even then, would it be a good idea ? Probably not.

[David R]

Personally I think the 'omg incompatible versions' thing is a poor argument against flash runtime being open-sourced. Java sucks for many reasons, but many incompatible runtimes is not one of them. Can you point out any java runtime that is not official that has any significant installbase at all?

[James Ahlschwede]

@David R: It's not just Java where this has happened before. Look at the browser incompatibilities and how much they have held back browser based applications over the years. That's exactly the type of world we'd be living in if the Flash Player was open-sourced.

Java was less open than traditional Open Source, and Microsoft still used that degree of openess to destroy it as a viable client-side platform. They would do the same thing to Flash if they had a chance.