Flash began its life online as an easy way to display vector graphics in browsers. Since then it’s evolved into a ubiquitous tool used for online video streaming, banner advertisements and audio streaming. Increasingly Adobe is becoming a bottleneck in Flash’s growth and it may be time for the company to embrace open source.

Most recently Adobe is getting a lot of attention for committing to build a version of Flash for the Apple iPhone, even though Steve Jobs is complaining that Flash is too slow for the iPhone. An open source community would quickly wrap its hive mind around an efficiency problem like this.

There are also legions of fans who use the Nintendo Wii, Sony’s PS3, and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 that are looking to stream video content directly through their consoles. BUT, since Adobe hasn’t updated its SDK any device not using Windows, Linux or Mac won’t include the latest version of Flash. Open source communities generally have the latest updates very quickly, as end users prompt for or contribute the updates themselves.

Microsoft has been pushing its new Silverlight platform, though it recently licensed Flash from Adobe for its Windows Mobile System. The risk here is for yet another platform that provides the same service to gain traction, introducing another incompatibility on the web where standardization benefits the masses.

An open source specification for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) already exists, supported by the W3C, but the marketing drive to build an open source community is missing. There are a few initiatives starting out there, but Adobe could jumpstart a community in one day.

By going open source with Flash, Adobe would benefit from an even larger customer base looking to buy software to create vector graphics, and it would own less maintenance of the product as open source developers would take ownership of pieces of the project.

Or, if Microsoft decides to open source Silverlight, then maybe Adobe will come around.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 11:38 pm under Internet, Opinion, Technology, Web2.0.

Read more entries by Matt Jansen.
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