The proprietary nature of Flash is a concern to advocates of open standards and free software. Its widespread use has, according to some such observers, harmed the otherwise open nature of the World Wide Web.[50] A response may be seen in Adobe's Open Screen Project.
Representing open standards, inventor of CSS and co-author of HTML5, Håkon Wium Lie explained in a Google tech talk the proposal of Theora as the video codec for HTML 5[51] (see also the Ogg controversy):
I believe very strongly, that we need to agree on some kind of baseline video format if [the video element] is going to succeed. Flash is today the baseline format on the web. The problem with Flash is that it's not an open standard.
Representing the free software movement, Richard Stallman stated in a speech in October 2004 that:[52]
The use of Flash in websites is a major problem for our community.
Stallman's argument then was that no free players were comparatively good enough. As of February 2010, Gnash and Swfdec have seen very limited success in competing with Adobe's player. Many important and popular websites require users to have a Flash player, sometimes with no fallback for non-Flash web users (e.g. YouTube). Therefore, the lack of a good free Flash player is arguably an obstacle to enjoying the web with free software, and the aforementioned ubiquity of Flash makes the problem very evident for anyone who tries. The continual high ranking of Gnash on the Free Software Foundation's list of high priority projects[53] might indicate the severity of the problem, as judged by the free software community.
Referring to the web's openness, an essential feature is that web pages as well as the files they consist of are coupled together by human readable text. Similarly, the openness of the internet lies in its protocols. Thus, the common practice by video centric websites of hiding the URL of web embedded multimedia using Flash or Silverlight, obfuscating the URL with JavaScript, or using custom protocols like RTMP (Flash) or MMS (Windows Media streams), may seem threatening to the openness of the web.
[edit]