Personally, I think it's a good move that Apple supports HTML5, b/c this will boost adoption of that new standard (cf.
current HTML5 spec).
Adobe's Flash development tools are so expensive that people who can't afford them are either using cracks or not purchasing them at all. I belong to the latter group: I simply refuse to spend hundreds of bucks on a piece of software just to create some measly Flash apps,
and hence I've never bothered to learn Flash. Seems like it wasn't necessary in the first place, if HTML5 proves to render Flash obsolete.
[highlight]
UPDATE: Note that the Flex 4 SDK is free and the Flex 4 framework open-source. At the time I wrote this, I didn't know that.[/highlight]
There's a long history of commercial developer tools that failed b/c they were pricey: In some software companies, only the free versions of Microsoft's developer tools are used, for instance. Or IBM failed with Visual Age for C++ Version 4, b/c people had just adopted Version 3.5. And nowadays, like for C++, many developers moved to free open-source tools like GCC etc., and that trend continues, the move to open standards and free open-source software, b/c this dramatically accelerates adoption of new technologies.
BTW, this might also lead to increased adoption of free, open-source OSes like Linux and BSD. Google's Android is based on Linux, for instance. Apple's MacOS X is based on a BSD kernel. And with time, I think, proprietary OSes will disappear altogether, enabling users to run vanilla copies of their favorite Linux or BSD. This also means that companies like Microsoft with their proprietary OS (Windows) will have to move to open-source software as well, one day. Why spend millions on development of Windows etc. when there's free-open source software galore than can do the same or better? I haven't been using Windows at all for years now (except for one tiny tax declaration app and one game or two). Usability of free open-source OSes like Linux or BSD gets better all the time.
