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A comment on Apple is just Microsoft with better marketing. Parent comment

Re:Apple is just Microsoft with better marketing by lazugod on Friday April 30, 2010 @07:32PM (#1309740)
Why doesn't Apple write their own Flash runtime? They did so for PDF on the Mac.

Or was "Thoughts on Flash" intended to be Jobs's pitch for Core Animation?

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Re:Apple is just Microsoft with better marketing by yardie on Saturday May 01, 2010 @05:55AM (#1310365)
They can't. No one can.

There are open source alternatives like Gnash but they are reverse-engineered runtimes. And like all RE'd apps they are at the mercy of Adobe. It already has problems with Flash 10. This is why Jobs argument is so valid. Anyone can write a swf file but it's restricted to running on Adobe's Flash runtime.

PDF is a special case. I still have an Acrobat 1.0 disk in storage with my Photoshop 3.1 floppies, somewhere. Adobe was giving it away at that point. They also gave licenses to PDFs. Only one company took the offer, Next. Apple bought Next and inherited that license from '93.

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