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Comment by doublerabbit | Hacker News Reader

> Good. It's great lesson for content creators and consumers about relying on proprietary formats.

How old are you? There is nothing wrong using proprietary formats and at the time there were no other alternatives. Macromedia were the pioneers of internet animation.

Even with HTML5 today there still isn't anything that allows me to produce a quick web animation with the likes of the Macromedia Flash. Adding that Flash would always produce the same result on any device that could support it. Mobile Phones, Symbian and even Palm tablets all supported it at one point.

Proprietary isn't the issue here, it's the monopoly that Adobe is. Adobe could of more and happy propped this up but no; like all major buyouts, bleed the product out to die. If it wasn't for Macromedia, Adobe wouldn't be what it is today.

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Proprietary is exactly the problem here. Your work can die at the whim of a corporation.

It gets even worse with product activation.

Even if something is proprietary but without activation, you can sort of preserve it. I can spin up an old version of WordStar in MS-DOS on my computer, and open up old WordStar documents. I can start up Windows 3.1 if I want in a VM. It's not as good as something open like LaTeX, but it's not completely useless.

If you use Adobe CS, and Adobe goes under, changes business models, or takes down its activation servers for any reasons, your life's work might be dead. Few corporations survive forever. Even fewer products do. That's why a lot of us avoid rights-managed or some types of cloud-based software for critical work (although a lot of cloud-based has very good export options, so I don't hesitate to use e.g. Google Docs).

Proprietary was all you had back in 2000:s -- And in this case, Adobe is still live and kicking. For a company who made $2.95B on net income last year, pish.

To execute a kill switch of "you are never allowed to run flash again" is far from fair, Adobe is the problem. However I will agree to differ; your work can die at the whim of a corporation.

Nah. In 2000, you could do what you wanted with Java Applets. Plus, you had desktop apps and all sorts of other options too. Was Flash technically better for a lot of uses? Without a doubt. But that's a choice one makes. At the time, I chose open (or at least more open), and I'm glad I did.

And Adobe is still alive, as are others like IBM, Microsoft, and friends. On the other hand, SGI, DEC, Sybase, Novell, SCO, and tons of other companies are dead. And some companies, like HP, are technically alive, but all their product lines from that era are dead.

Getting burned once or twice is enough to understand that the organizational, political, and human sides tend to matter more than the technical. Older folks tend to chose stable, open solutions. Younger folks who haven't gone through that yet tend to chose technically glitzy solutions.

You say Adobe being a monopoly is the problem, but you don't realize the proprietary format of Adobe allows it to be a monopoly. If flash source code was open, there would be alternative flash implementations.

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