In an unusual move, Steve Jobs has fired publicly back at Adobe's (NASDAQ: ADBE) complaint about Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) rejection of its Flash plug-in on the iPhone and iPad platforms. Interestingly, Apple seems to be of the opinion that its platform is open whereas Adobe's isn't. Jobs said, "Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true."

Is this a case of the pot calling the kettle black? Jobs elaborated, and pointed out that while the Mac platform is indeed proprietary, the company has adopted open standards such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Not everyone is buying this argument though, and many are questioning if Apple's aggressive stance against third-party development tools is hurting developers who have to invest the time learning a new platform.

Tim Bray, a Google engineer on the Android team, felt that Apple is being shortsighted by blocking flash, while Al Hilwa, an analyst with IDC, called for a truce. What is your take on this matter? Is Flash still so important?

For more on this story:
- check out the article at InformationWeek 

Related Articles:
Steve Jobs: Flash is an old technology
Time for Apple and Adobe to bury the hatchet on Flash
Apple maintains ban on Adobe with iPhone 4.0
Maybe Steve Jobs was right about Adobe
Apple's Jobs disses Google Android