Gruber: ‘Adobe Flash is almost as open as Microsoft Office’

“‘Open’ is one of those terms that means a lot of different things to different people. Most should be able to agree, though, that open-vs.-closed is a continuum — shades of gray, not just black and white,” John Gruber writes for Daring Fireball. “A light enough shade of gray is ‘open,’ dark enough is ‘closed.’ The arguments are over where those thresholds lie.”

“Microsoft published the OOXML file format specs for its Office apps,” Gruber explains. “And not only did they publish the specs, they submitted them to a widely-respected industry standards organization, and now they’re ISO standards.”

Gruber writes, “Adobe’s Flash specs have never been submitted to a standards body, let alone accepted, thus, anyone who argues that Adobe Flash is open would agree that Microsoft Office is even more open.”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “jax44” for the heads up.]