Still waiting for Flash

Still waiting for Flash

Someday, people will figure out that closed standards (like Flash) are best avoided. Meanwhile, Flash is a fact of life that we will need to deal with. It appears that we are getting closer to being able to deal with it - but we are not there yet.

Where is the free alternative to Flash, then? The FOSS community, I regret to say, has failed to provide any, and I think that's one of the main reasons why everyone's using Flash - it's there, it just works(tm), and it does what you need.

Of course it's possible (and ideologically pure) to sit on a high horse and wring your hands at people who just want to get stuff done and who are willing to choose a non-free, proprietary solution when no free one exists. But you (the FOSS community) also need to blame yourself: you haven't provided any alternatives, and no amount of consternation is going to change anything. You can sit there and mourn the sad state of the world where people care more about the end results than about using proprietary software, or you can wake up and smell the roses, roll up your sleeves, and implement a free (both as in beer and as in freedom) alternative.

Why do you think Linux is so successful, for example? The reason is that it's a great system, and while the fact that's FOSS certainly also plays a role, a system that was free yet crappy wouldn't enjoy the same success.

So instead of complaining about the fact that people use Flash, give them an alternative. If you build it, they will come.

It's been out there for years. It's called SVG + XHTML + JavaScript + CSS.

However, few know how this could be put together in a coherent fashion, and there's no dev
tool to create an SVG animation that even remotely mirrors the ease-of-use Adobe Flash CS3
gives. And it has a bunch of other problems as well.

The pieces are there. Might need a bit work on the rough edges, but until someone genuinely
*tries* to create something with it, until support for SVG is available in *all* major
browsers (either as a plugin or natively in the browsers) and until there's a killer feature
for it, adoption won't happen.