... except in this case you don't have to pay a single cent to the crack dealer to continue enjoying your 'addiction', and the chemical formula of the drug is free and publicly available, even the process of creating it is mostly well documented, so if you wish you can cook it by yourself... And, as much as I don't like the idea of a single dealer behind the whole drug production, in many cases it's less of a health risk than puffing the street crack cooked in some dirty bathtub that in dependence of your metabolism may wreck a havoc to your system, or work way slower than you'd like, or may not work at all... Of course, just like with any other drug, it shouldn't be abused... That's as far as analogies go...

The problem with Flash, in this case, is that you don't have a faintest idea of what you are talking about, yet you try to bash it based on FUD that's been steadily and mainly spread by Apple fanbois since the iPhone (and rest of the iDon'tCare technologies) was announced to have no Flash plugin. Sour grapes in a nutshell. What's even funnier is that people obsessed with the most draconian company in the history of computing, when it comes to licensing and control, start complaining that other technologies are not as open as they'd like. So, let me correct that one for you:

1) The SWF file format has been open since the 2000 (I wrote a .swf compiler in 2000), or maybe even before that as I can't remember correctly when was the switch from the old FutureSplash format into a new Flash, SWF based format. You can read the most recent format specs @ http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/pdf/...t_spec_v10.pdf

2) Flash Player was closed source and under restrictive licensing until Adobe acquired Macromedia, at least for regular people - companies could purchase the source (for $10k IRRC) under restrictive licensing if they wanted to adapt the Flash Player to their platform. Even in those days were some 3rd party Flash Player completely independent of Macromedia but they were nowhere near feature-complete or widely spread as Macromedia's solution.

Flash Player today is mainly open-source, sans the codecs (MP3, On2 VP6, H.264...) and several other technologies that are not owned by Adobe but are licensed from 3rd parties, and thus Adobe cannot open them. That's the same reason why you cannot consider Google Chrome an open-source browser - yes it's based on the open-source Chromium (and by that chain on WebKit) but you can't get the licensed H.264 decoder and several other things (hardware video acceleration based on closed-source drivers from the manufacturers for example). About 80% of today's Flash Player is its ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) which was completely open almost from the day one, and publicly available via the project Tamarin. The rest of the specific implementations (i.e. PixelBender) can be acquired via the Adobe Open Source and Adobe Labs.

3) The Flash compiler used by Adobe IDEs (Flash/Flex Builder and Flash CS*) is also free and open-source and is called Flex SDK. Apart from the compilers and other tools, it includes the complete Flex Framework (components, skins, additional builders, etc.) as well, needed for easy and hassle-free fast deployment of RIAs and AIR applications.

4) There is not a single line in EULA/TOA/TOS of free Adobe tools and technologies that even vaguely restricts you to do whatever you want with their sources and tools. As long as you are not selling them, of course.

5) Adobe went even a step further opening all the proprietary protocols as well - namely RTMP that was the thing selling their Adobe Media Server - and that had to be previously hacked by reverse engineering to get a free Flash streaming via the quite popular OS media server - Red5.

6) Flash as a technology/platform is as open as Sun's Java is. And in some extent even more (at least they give you the source used in their own VM and completely open-source compilers, not just the documentation and format specification).

7) .NET, and thus inherently the Silverlight platform, is closed-source in all aspects except the format specs, which allowed enthusiasts to develop Moonlight based on that. That's the same situation Flash was in about 4 years ago, before the move to AVM2 and Flex SDK (Flash 8 and earlier versions), where there were at least two quite successful projects based solely on the format specifications - MTASC compiler and the haXe platform. There are tons of other OS projects based on the SWF/FLV/F4V formats and technologies that you can check at Open Source Flash portal. Since Adobe opened most of the Flash platform, hundreds of new projects arrived.

It doesn't hurt to know a thing or two behind a technology you wish to make bold claims against...