Recently I posted a comment on Ted Patrick's blog. His post was about Yahoo!'s recent move from flex 1.5 to a JavaScript based solution (AJAX). Of course, as a Flex developer working for Adobe, Ted was disappointed by Yahoo!'s move, fair enough. But neither the author or comments supplied enough good arguments to make me think it was a bad move.
This is what made me comment:
kosirm ~ December 18, 2007 4:00 AM
maybe one of the reasons for decision was the fact, that ajax is free...
Ted Patrick ~ December 18, 2007 4:25 AM
kosirm,
Flex 2.0 SDK (mxml, as3, components, compiler) is free Flex 3.0 SDK (mxml, as3, components, compiler) is free. Flash Player is free.
If you want advanced tooling for Flex development, that costs money but the entire stack for creating Flex based applications is FREE, FREE, FREE.
Also Flex 3.0 is open source under a Mozilla License at release in early 2008.
Price was not a factor at all.
Ted :)
To which I commented back:
h3 ~ December 19, 2007 10:56 AM
Hello Ted, Interesting article, thanks. But reading comments, I wish Kosirm got the real point. Of course it's not the price.
Flash is great and will always have considerable advantages over JavaScript, it's undeniable. But while Flex might be open source, Flash is not. In the end you're always relying on a closed source proprietary platform that belong to a big corporation. Inevitably you end up relying on this corporation.
I don't know if I'm the only one who care, but for me it means a lot. It means I will never use Flash to build applications for the same reasons I don't use .NET.
cheers.
And some creative mind with a doubtful sense of humour replied:
h4 ~ December 19, 2007 11:30 AM
I think I get "h3's" point but I doubt this was yahoo's reason. Are they trying to live the pure-life that people like h3 do... where they never use any commercial products or rely on a corporation on which to build a business? Seriously, if you live in a yurt, watch no tv, and power your computer with a generator hooked to a bicycle pedals--then okay, you are better than us.
Out of curiosity, what kind of work do you do h3? Do you clients care or is this simply a personal way-of-life.
I think that h4's concerns are understandable. The answer I had was to long to post on a comment thread and this is an interesting question so I though I'd try to clarify my point of view in a blog post instead.
But first here's what kind of work I do:
I spared you the boring stuff.. But more importantly, most of the thing I do and like to do only requires me only free and open source tools (So h4, I guess that yes you could call it a way of life).
The closed source model is flawed and cannot be fixed because it's made by and for corporations and share holders, in other words profits are the top priority, not the end users or the developers. And we can't hold it against them, it's the basis of capitalism. But that business models is precisely why I think open source is better.
For a while now, I use exclusively Ubuntu at home and I don't miss Windows at all. Actually I miss Ubuntu when I'm at work.
Why? Because yes it's a way of life. And luckily I'm not the only one who live like this. I feel it every time I use Ubuntu. It's more efficient, more reliable, more stable, more fun to use, more customizable. And the biggest irony, the only time I had to push the reset button of my computer because it was unresponsive is when I right clicked on a Youtube video and clicked "Flash settings". I also have to recompile my flash plugin because it freeze randomly and stop working. I did it so often that I made a simple bash script to fix it, it's the kind of little things that makes you enjoy Linux; you can fix things.
So the only thing that is a major pain in my system is proprietary and I can't just "ignore it" because I have a web related job and I would also miss too much content.
Now the things I don't like about flash:
But that's more my personal frustrations.
Now let's resume the essence of the pro-flex:
it's faster, better and gives you more candies. (now that flex 2 is out ..)
and mine:
it runs on a proprietary platform.
It's simple as this. Flex might be open source, but it's sill constrained to a closed source platform controlled by a single corporation. A monopole.
My argument is that you have zero control whatsoever over a technology on which you do business and ultimately rely on. Worst than that: you actually put all the control in the hand of a single corporation and allow it to impose it's own standards and change it at will.
And it's not paranoia, yes I believe in good business. But rarely in a monopoly situation. From my experience until now I've learned that a corporation in monopoly situation;
To conclude, beside looking like a Flash basher I actually like this technology and use it when I think it's the right technology for the job. I also like to see Adobe making nice moves toward open source like porting the platform to Linux and making flex an open source project. It's great and appreciated, really.
And happy new year, best wishes for everyone :)
*UPDATE*: That's exactly the kind of shit I expected.
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