bestkungfu weblog

Flash is another world. I’ve been reading a lot of Flash development blogs, to see how (or whether) they’re dealing with accessibility, what’s new, and what’s worth checking out. But a lot of what I’ve been seeing is ways to hide information, rather than share it. Case in point: FlashGuru’s “solution” for Flash movie decompilers — which amounts to voluntarily crippling the offending application, and effectively blackmailing developers of Flash sites to pass over their movies. Or, says the author, have the decompiler respect password protection.

This particular blog entry underscores the vast differences between the Web community and the Flash community. Flash developers are paranoid about their ActionScript, guarding their new-found skills anywhere they can charge for it: in classes, books, consultancies, wherever. On the other hand, the Web, you’ll remember, was built on code sharing (if not outright theft). View Source has always been, and hopefully will always be, a part of every browser. If Macromedia really wanted Flash to have caught on, they’d have made it that way in Flash early on. Every site a tool, every script a lesson.

I can see that Flash developers want to keep a hold of their intellectual property, but Jesus, man, you’re not curing cancer or accurately predicting the stock market. You’re making things move around and blink on a screen. Get over yourselves. Anyone who applies themselves can figure out and replicate what you do.

The only reason I feel strongly about this is that it’s another one of those rifts between open- and closed-Web advocates. It’s another artificial barrier, another walled garden, another step backward from the free exchange of knowledge to the old world where everyone has to pay to play. Information wants to be free. Which is why attempts like this to chain it up will inevitably fail. All it takes is for another decompiler to route around the damage, and the game goes on. Stop trying to figure out how to get the horse back into the barn, and start learning to deal with the nature of the Web.