It seems to me like the biggest arguments against Flash right now falls into three categories:
- It is slow and battery intensive. Basically that it uses too much CPU than it should.
- It is not an open standard. Eveyone knows how HTML/CSS and JavaScript operate inside. Flash is not open.
- It has security flaws which make it insecure.
Seems like all of these concerns could be addressed if Adobe opensourced the Flash player. Third parties could contribute to and audit the code base, and optimize and fix bugs. Adobe could concentrate on making the apps and environments that author Flash content best.
Well, Adobe hasn’t done that yet. Why not? What are the business/technical reasons that makes Adobe want to keep control of a closed source Flash player?
I agree with you that Flash in general has the flaws you pointed (1, 3) but about (2) I don’t know what part of Flash you’re talking about but the SWF which is the output of Flash is an open standard and Adobe still commits publishing documentation for it, and so I know how Flash Player reads this type of files.
On the other hand, Adobe has published an open-source Flex SDK which is now the open-source alternative to Flash IDE.
In short, Adobe is trying to stay in the battle of companies acquisitions and don’t want to lose a strong card like Flash (from its point of view).
Though, some rumors were up in the past month about Microsoft acquiring Adobe but apparently they won’t at least in the near future, no one guesses about Microsoft.