HN Gopher Feed (2017-07-26) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Petition to open source Flash
316 points by pkstn
https://github.com/pakastin/open-source-flash___________________________________________________________________
mstade - 15 minutes ago
FWIW I posted[1] in the Flash EOL thread the other day that an
Adobe employee told me years ago that licensing issues were the
main hindrance to open sourcing the Flash player. (Another HN user
who said they used to work for Adobe seems to back this up.) A lot
of technology in the player was licensed and difficult to
remove/refactor such that the player code could realistically be
opened up, and there was little business incentive to invest
resources into it. I'd imagine the incentives are even less
now.[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14850791
imagetic - 1 hours ago
Let it die.
JohnTHaller - 51 minutes ago
No, you don't need your silly flash player to play free games in
your web browser or offer to users at a payment plan and method of
your choosing. We've got this great app store for you to use that
only costs $100 a year to submit apps to and we keep 30% of all the
money you make on your game.
jayflux - 2 hours ago
Even if this did happen I doubt browsers would support it (as
already mentioned) If nostalgia is the problem, it would be far
less effort to recompile those games into html5
scj - 1 hours ago
Open sourcing code allows a new vector for finding vulnerabilities.
Just because the software reaches its EOL doesn't mean it is
removed from every computer.I believe that open sourcing Flash
should be done for the sake of software preservation. But I would
recommend 2025 (end of life for Windows 10 and IE11) as the
earliest release date.
nkkollaw - 2 hours ago
Why not contribute to well-established open source Flash players?ht
tp://lightspark.github.io/https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
Overtonwindow - 2 hours ago
All of the above.
tbodt - 2 hours ago
An open source Flash player is not perfectly bug-for-bug
compatible with the real Flash player.
nkkollaw - 2 hours ago
Sure, but if anyone is really interested in Flash and Adobe's
player is reaching EOL, whatever open source project gets to be
used as its substitute will become the standard, and no one
will care about compatibility with Adobe's Flash player, since
no one will have it installed.
btown - 2 hours ago
This ignores all legacy Flash applications, which were
designed for the original player (bugs and all). These are
the legacy that need to be preserved. Presumably (though I'd
love to see counterexamples) most people using Adobe Animate
CC (the latest version and rebrand of Flash) these days are
targeting HTML5 anyways.
nkkollaw - 2 hours ago
Ah, I see.Then I guess the bugs can be taken into account
like Firefox did with IE6?Perhaps having a compatibility-
mode on/off so that new movies could follow the standard.
simion314 - 1 hours ago
I think movies and animations are not the problem, those
would be easy to playback if the codecs are right, there
are planty of games, some 3d, and some interactive
applications that use Flash and Flex, there are tons of
APIs that Flash supports and implementing all of those
exactly as in Flash was a huge task for the community,
since Flash is not used in new projects just as legacy
very few developers are interested in working on that in
their free time.
tbodt - 2 hours ago
Which one is everyone going to install: an open source flash
player that's not quite compatible, or the adobe one that's
perfectly compatible?
nkkollaw - 2 hours ago
The one that isn't abandoned, which in 2020 will be the
open source one.Again, I don't see why if there's interest
in Flash and Adobe is abandoning its player, the open
source ones can't be made to work as well (or as bad) as
Adobe's.Firefox copied IE's quirks back in the day, I don't
see why it can't be done again.
yuhong - 2 hours ago
Flash is more complex than HTML/CSS/JS though.
hexmiles - 1 hours ago
are you sure? i worked with flash and actionscript, and i
doubt they are more complex than html/css/js, personaly i
think the contrary.What make more difficult the
reimplementation is the abscence of a specification or a
standard.
yuhong - 40 minutes ago
I am talking about the entire history of Flash from 1996
on.
leeter - 2 hours ago
Or https://github.com/mozilla/shumway which doesn't require any
native code
mgamache - 1 hours ago
Shumway is a dead project (hasn't been updated for a while).
Too bad, because it showed promise.
fmoralesc - 1 hours ago
It can be forked and continued.
szatkus - 34 minutes ago
Last time I tried it was working surprisingly well. Even if
it's dead it can be useful.
yjftsjthsd-h - 13 minutes ago
> Even if it's dead it can be useful.An appropriate thing
to say in a discussion about Flash :)
simion314 - 1 hours ago
IF Adobe open source it with a good license would make the live
easier to the other projects, you could probably reimplement 80%
of Flash without problems just by using the API documentation but
the rest of 20% will be harder, having the code would solve this.
StevePerkins - 2 hours ago
Because they're all alpha-level, and will probably always be to
Flash what ReactOS is to Windows.
nkkollaw - 2 hours ago
Perhaps, but let's say Windows is gone tomorrow: wouldn't React
OS gain a lot of traction given all the software for Windows,
and perhaps get a spike of volunteers?
ben174 - 1 hours ago
> let's say Windows is gone tomorrowone can dream
gamedna - 1 hours ago
Flash has generated a tremendous amount of assets that will be
lost. Preserving them for historical reasons is extremely
important but i am far less interested in preserving the technology
than preserving the idea or creation itself. I would love to see an
effort around conversion or transcoding flash assets to other
technologies. For example, flash movies being rendered to an open
standard or flash games being automatically converted to
javascript/html5. The content creator deserve to have their
legacy recorded and maintained but this is not the solution.
(granted it may be a solution for other use cases, but i am not
sure what those are)
simion314 - 57 minutes ago
To transcode all Flash content you need a similar amount of work
as reimplementing Flash since you need to transcode all the
functions, it is similar as Wine project is doing and it is
always behind and there are bugs, having the source will help
implementingt the translation.
CrankyBear - 44 minutes ago
Really? Really!? All the years we've suffered with this, this
insecure "Thing* and you want to give it eternal life in open
source? Not just no, but hell no. You want video? Use HTML 5's
Theora, H264, or WebM.
ram_rar - 1 hours ago
Its already open sourced. Its called HTML5!
aylmao - 1 hours ago
I learned to program in ActionScript 2 on Macromedia Flash MX back
in high-school. In spite of all the (deserved) hate Flash gets, we
got to give it credit too.- It was a response to the stagnant IE-
dominated web that allowed people to experiment and create
incredibly rich content that is still hard to replicate.- It's
editor was amazing for introductory programming. It was as easy and
intuitive to use as any vector-graphics editor, but you could get
really complex on your programming too. It was very visual, very
graphical, which helped.- It was great for animation. I really
can't think of anything that compares. There's lots of animation
software out there but most are targeted to video. There's lots of
libraries for animating Canvas/SVG, but they don't have
interfaces/editors for non-programmers. Flash was an amazing
middle-ground; a great creative AND technical tool IMO.-
ActionScript was nice; it wasn't daunting, it had types to help
you, but they didn't clutter the syntax. If I recall correctly, the
tooling wasn't too shabby either, with good auto-complete and
suggestions as you type.It's thus no wonder it caught on like
wildfire and there was so much content for it. It was a good option
for technical projects and creative ones, beginners and experts. I
definitely don't want to see Flash making a comeback on web, but I
wouldn't mind seeing it in standalone applications (assuming
security doesn't become an issue), and I could see its value on
education, granted, with the right editors and tools.
rnhmjoj - 1 hours ago
As long as it stays away from a browser it's perfectly fine.I am
already using gnash to run flash games and a feature complete open
source implementation would be very welcome.
simion314 - 1 hours ago
I can't understand why people are against open sourcing some
proprietary code, why would it affect you? If you hate Flash that
much you will have the opportunity to see the source code and
confirm that is bad. All the open source reimplementation are
incomplete, so with the opening up of Flash the open source ones
could have a look (if license allows) and finish the
reimplementation.
watwut - 1 hours ago
Hate does not have to be rational - just as any other emotion. It
also does not matter whether flash code quality is good or bad.
It influences nothing at this point. They want it bad, so they
will see it bad. And since all bigger projects have dirty places
here and there, flash is pretty much guaranteed to have some too.
chickenfries - 38 minutes ago
I can't believe what I'm seeing. People on HN don't want
something to be open sourced? Is it opposite day?
notacoward - 54 minutes ago
> why would it affect you?Security affects everyone. Even if I
can keep my own machine uninfected, I can't do the same for my
bank's machines. Nor can I do the same for random strangers
whose machines get 0wned and then used to launch new attacks
against me, my bank, and everyone else. Insecure software needs
to be replaced by more secure software, not put on indefinite
life support.
midnitewarrior - 1 hours ago
I don't think anybody wants to see what's actually under the
covers. Also, I'm pretty sure they've licensed patents from other
participants, so it's not very likely they would bother trying to
figure out all those details.Future history does need a copy they
can use in the future to look at web sites of the past though.
Content that relies on proprietary technology will be lost in the
annals of history.
jarym - 1 hours ago
So much hate for Flash. Yes it has regular security holes, is CPU
hungry and a lot of people used it to create some mightily annoying
things....But Flash was a gift from the gods back in the early days
of IE and most people forget that. If you wanted to make some HTML
look nice you had little more than the dreaded 'blink' tag to work
with.If it weren't for Flash I doubt we'd have anywhere near as
advanced CSS, SVG, Canvas and HTML5 bells and whistles that
designers can actually use now.I doubt Adobe will open source it
though. They probably know there's a whole heap of other security
issues in it that'll get found and exploited as soon as they
release it. Your average user won't be able to patch fast enough!
mawburn - 1 hours ago
It's ok to dislike something and recognize how poor it is
compared to better implementations it helped inspire, but still
respect what it did for us in the past.Flash, Java Applets, and
jQuery all changed the web for the better and were amazing things
at one time. But we should move on.
baby - 55 minutes ago
What's the point of moving on from jQuery? Does plain
javascript now offers the same functionalities?
mawburn - 43 minutes ago
For the most part for common tasks supporting IE10+,
yes.There are still some things it will do for you that can
be tedious with vanilla and arguments could still be made to
use it as a dependency. But imho, it should be treated more
of as an optional dependency that you use when/if you need
it, rather than a cross browser compatibility
crutch.http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ helped me out quite
a bit as I transitioned away from using it for day to day.
It's not exactly 1-to-1, but it helped ease the initial pain.
Ajedi32 - 1 hours ago
> They probably know there's a whole heap of other security
issues in it that'll get found and exploited as soon as they
release it.So wait until 2020, after all major browsers have
dropped support for it. No reason to worry about vulnerabilities
in software that nobody's using in production anymore. If anyone
still cares, they can always fix the security problems
themselves.
tjoff - 1 hours ago
If it weren't for Flash I doubt we'd have anywhere near as
advanced CSS, SVG, Canvas and HTML5 bells and whistles that
designers can actually use now.And the web is much worse because
of it.The one thing that was excellent about flash was that you
could easily disable it and all the security issues and annoying
crap would disappear. You can't do that today without breaking
stuff.
riffraff - 1 hours ago
I had browser games in flash that worked, now I have unity games
that don't.I honestly wish we'd stuck with flash.
notacoward - 27 minutes ago
As the currently-most-upvoted hater, I kind of agree. Flash was
fantastic back in the day. I played many games and movies that
way, and was thusly enriched. But the Sega Genesis was also
great in its day. So was the vinyl record. Those days are gone.
Flash has accrued negatives, which now outweigh the positives.
xupybd - 19 minutes ago
Sega has emulators, vinyl record players still exist.Open
sourcing flash doesn't mean it will stay mainstream, it
probably shouldn't. But there is valuable flash content. If
they kill flash and don't open source it, the only way to run
flash will be on old browsers possible in old operating
systems. This will put a big burden on businesses requiring old
flash apps.
mtgx - 2 hours ago
Isn't Flash player's code super-messy by now? (a hint towards that
could be all the vulnerabilities found for it every week). Open
sourcing it would have to dramatically improve the code quality and
in a relatively short period of time (2 years max), otherwise
browser vendors would never go along with it (nor should
they).Sounds like a daunting task, especially if no big
organization/leader takes up the task of cleaning it up, the way
OpenBSD did with LibreSSL.
Houshalter - 2 hours ago
You don't necessarily need to fix all the bugs. It just needs to
be sandboxed properly. In the extreme case you could compile it
to web assembly and run it inside the browsers existing wasm
sandbox.I think all the comments are missing the point. This is
about preserving our digital history. A huge amount of content
exists only in flash. It would be sad to see it all disappear.
It's even being used in important AI research, with openAI making
a ton of old flash games available for training AIs. I have fond
memories of many simple flash games I used to play on the school
computers. I still have a bunch of .swf files I saved that won't
open anymore.
IncRnd - 1 hours ago
If you like your flash plugins, don't delete them.
Ajedi32 - 1 hours ago
> otherwise browser vendors would never go along with itHuh? Who
said anything about browser vendors? This is about preserving
history, not preserving features in web browsers. Browser vendors
can and should continue to remove support for Flash regardless of
whether it's open sourced or not.
tbodt - 2 hours ago
Flash doesn't have to be shipped with browsers. You could always
install it manually.
yuhong - 2 hours ago
It probably still would not be enabled by default.
esMazer - 2 hours ago
it'd be so embarrassing that it'll never happen
captn3m0 - 2 hours ago
How about just open sourcing pepper flash to start with? That has
fewer security issues, if I understand it correctly.
joezydeco - 2 hours ago
I had access to the FlashLite source code a while back, and it
was a total disaster. I can't imagine how bad the mainline code
is.
zwetan - 40 minutes ago
what about petitioning Google so they open source Swiffy ?To me
Google Chrome is the one responsible for killing Flash, Adobe is
just playing catch up.
prodikl - 2 hours ago
ActionScript is still loved by the Starling community. I don't
really think i'll miss the swf format, though
xilni - 2 hours ago
Dear god no, please just let it die, I don't care about Badger,
Badger, snake or Flash hentai flash game nostalgia that much.
Miky - 53 minutes ago
Just because a piece of culture isn't exactly to your particular
taste doesn't mean it shouldn't be preserved and it should be
impossible for anyone to experience it in the future. And
besides, that's a really selective and disingenuous
generalization of Flash. There are a huge number of important,
interesting Flash games that are worth preserving for history's
sake.
pat_space - 2 hours ago
What about the end of the world? Are you le tired?
xilni - 2 hours ago
Yes, most definitely le tired of having to deal with Flash.
gburt - 2 hours ago
This is a really short-sighted perspective. Letting Flash die
would be a serious contributor to bit rot. Archival of all the
historical content created in Flash is a respectable goal even if
we should _never use Flash again for anything new_.
nradov - 2 hours ago
Chances are that Flash contains licensed third-party IP and thus
Adobe couldn't unilaterally open source it even if they wanted to.
larsiusprime - 2 hours ago
True, but even a non-functional source dump with lots of the guts
ripped out and redacted would be extremely useful for researchers
and preservationists.
lj3 - 2 hours ago
Now I'm really curious if that's the case. It could explain why
they didn't open source the Flash runtime back when they open
sourced the flex compiler.
ghaff - 1 hours ago
At the very least, there would certainly need to be a lot of
due diligence work. A lot of people seem to think that open
sourcing something is as simple as dumping a source code tree
to github, setting a license, and calling it a day.It's not.
Even when doing so is a priority, it can take months of work.
odammit - 37 minutes ago
I would love to see what kind of Simcities are in that source code
omarforgotpwd - 2 hours ago
Yikes. How about a petition to burn it with fire? Petition to erase
all mention of flash from history books?
cgb223 - 1 hours ago
There are a ton of Black Hat hackers who would love to see this
petition become realShut it down, the internet is massively more
secure without flash
dim13 - 2 hours ago
Let it go gracefully.
ransom1538 - 1 hours ago
Again. From my game dev days, the people that really lose (over and
over) are the artists. Millions of hours have been sunk into laying
out vector graphics with the Flash IDE. Code I understand should
eventually be tossed away, but, not art. I guess staring at
millions of beautiful vector timelined illustrations changed my
opinion - but it is art to me. And like books, I think its a sin to
toss. I hope the artists convert their .fla files over and save
what they can.
eric_h - 30 minutes ago
That's not going away, though. Adobe Animate isn't being EOL'ed.
yuhong - 2 hours ago
This will probably take years of course. Hopefully the H.264
patents will expire at least not long afterwards.
kahlonel - 1 hours ago
I would do anything to preserve those white buttons with glowy
green borders.
unsignedint - 33 minutes ago
Aren't more of recent application for Flash is to deliver DRMed
video while rest moving to something else like HTML5. If this is
the case opensource Flash won't really help...
cosinetau - 2 hours ago
No. Move on with your lives.Edit: Sign my petition
https://github.com/mashiox/open-source-flash/blob/master/REA...
[deleted]
Anatidae - 2 hours ago
There could be an issue of opening up even more security issues for
people with Flash still installed. That, in turn, will likely lead
to an all out campaign to remove Flash from everything possible
(maybe not a bad thing at this point).But, honestly - Flash as a
platform hasn't advanced much in quite a while. What it once
offered - rich multimedia runtime engine across platforms - is
either available in the browser directly or can be attained through
even more rich engines such as Unity3D.
aarongolliver - 2 hours ago
There is an all out campaign to remove flash from everything
possible. Soon it will be gone from every major browser and
phone. That's exactly what this is in response to.Personally I
just want to ensure there's a way for me to go back and look at
all the work I did in high school. It's already a pain to figure
out how to run my old SWF files, and soon it's going to be nearly
impossible.Maybe I should just snapshot a VM with everything set
up correctly?
simion314 - 53 minutes ago
If you use the VM solution you probably need some open VM
format, in case in a few years the current formats are dropped.
yjftsjthsd-h - 12 minutes ago
Just use a raw disk image? What format is there to lose?
[deleted]
sureste - 2 hours ago
I support this. In 20 years when no one is using it anymore and the
source code is released for academic purposes.
c4ncri - 1 hours ago
Let flash die. We don't need it. We got HTML5.
mgamache - 35 minutes ago
No one who has used both significantly really thinks HTML5 can
provide an equivalent alternative to the Flash platform today.
Sure it can cover a lot of the common use cases and it can be
made to work, but it's really a poor substitute (albeit without
the security and other issues). HTML5 is the future, but it still
needs work.
bricss - 1 hours ago
Burn it to hell ?
dhosek - 2 hours ago
How about a petition to have Adobe put into all versions of Flash
going forward code to disable the flash player on the EOL date so
that the danger of security vulnerabilities from the damn thing
will be greatly reduced.
joe_momma - 2 hours ago
There should just be a Flash only browser with an HTML5 blocker
muhahaha.
rbanffy - 1 hours ago
Please, let it die.
notacoward - 2 hours ago
No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will
make it live forever.Flash has very little to offer that is not at
this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. It's also
woefully insecure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" will only
work for the most trivial bugs in the most common code paths.
Plenty of vulnerabilities will remain. In open source, they'll be
even easier for attackers to find and exploit. If you want
something open-source and (mostly) Flash compatible, follow
nkkollaw's suggestion: support one of the already-open-source
alternatives.
tarboreus - 1 hours ago
This is off base. Flash will die regardless, but making it open
source will make it possible to preserve internet history.
niutech - 54 minutes ago
Flash will not be further developed by 2020, but it does not
mean the Flash Player suddenly will stop running the SWF files.
djhworld - 2 hours ago
Even if it's not going to be in browsers, I wonder if there's
value in open sourcing it so people can create applications that
run flash apps.There's a lot of content out there made with
flash, especially games.
soylentcola - 2 hours ago
Is there still a standalone Flash player? (or at least, will
the debug version work?) Haven't messed with Flash stuff in
over a decade but I remember having a standalone player to play
downloaded SWF files back in the day. No idea if there's
anything roughly equivalent out there in its current
incarnation.A sandboxed player application would go a long way
toward the uses mentioned in this thread, no? I wonder when
we'll start seeing Flash emulators being developed to play back
all that old content.
dragonwriter - 2 hours ago
> I wonder when we'll start seeing Flash emulators being
developed to play back all that old
content.http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/
tbodt - 1 hours ago
Last commit was made in March 2016.
SolarNet - 1 hours ago
A dead project due to the shear complexity and obfuscation
and proprietary bug/feature weirdness (e.g. undocumented
relied upon in some edge case feature/bugs tend to exist in
proprietary single-implementation systems) of flash.Things
like Mono took a decade to finish as an exact clone of a
portion of Microsoft's implementation, and that was only
possible because the people using it (the target audience
begin linux programmers) could fix the code as needed.
Flash's target audience is artists.
captainmuon - 1 hours ago
Do you think Flash is insecure in principle, or in
implementation? I think it is very much a problem of the
implementation. I don't know if Adobe/Macromedia could have done
better, or if the backwards compatibility requirements make it
impossible to maintain, but I'd like to see for myself.Anyway,
you have no reason to be afraid. All mayor browsers are dropping
support for plugins anyway. An open source flash player will most
likely be used standalone, and not in a browser.(I can't help but
wonder if we are making a huge historical mistake here by the
way. Because the Flash implementation was so bad, we were led to
believe that plugins are bad per se. But at least in theory, it
seems to me that the best architecture would be a minimal browser
(just a layout engine), and everything as a plugin. Current
browser are horrible monolithic giants, that only mega-
corporations (and Mozilla ;-)) can maintain. That they are
relatively secure is only due to the massive amounts of human-
years that went into polishing and bug fixing in the recent
decade.)
mtgx - 1 hours ago
The only way to solve that implementation problem is to create
competition, just like you have with HTML.So the W3C would have
to define "standard Flash specification" and then everyone
would have to implement their own "Flash player". But ain't
nobody got time for that.If the "Flash player" had been a
specification rather than a piece of standalone software from
day one, I believe the overall security of the Flash players
would have been way better.
dragonwriter - 35 minutes ago
> An open source flash player will most likely be used
standalone, and not in a browser.It'll most likely be modified
to run in browsers, too, e.g., via compilation to WebAssembly
and suitable web-platform replacements for the low-level IO,
etc., implementations.
__s - 1 hours ago
The issue with a plugin architecture is that it makes it
difficult to compete. There essentially will come a pool of
plugins which are expected to be installed on every user's
machine, & without standardization or open source
implementations you'll end up with 1 plugin being used on any
base browser as opposed to different versions on each browserIn
theory we could create a basic browser with various HTML/JS/CSS
spec features created as a plugin
captainmuon - 54 minutes ago
You could also argue in the opposite direction: Without a
plugin architecture, you are at the mercy of the browser
developers to implement a certain functionality.If you need
some native feature, browser vendors can force you to use a
native app and thus go through their app store (think Safari
on iOS). There is a large category of apps that you cannot
make in HTML, for example anything truly P2P (not WebRTC, but
based on real sockets). You can't make an IMAP client. You
can't make a friend-to-friend file sharing tool, without a
central server, that uses your Facebook and Google contacts
to find peers (I've tried). You can't make the browser window
partially-transparent or use native looking widgets. You
can't burn a DVD. And if someone invents free-floating
holograms, you can't add them to your page.Granted, these
examples are silly. The web is now a very capable platform.
But vendors have always been steering what you can and cannot
do based on business and other interests. It would be great
to be able to break out of that, by having a kind of "C
foreign function" interface for the web.
Lerc - 2 minutes ago
In addition to this. Many of the new Web features came
from people going "Flash does it". Plugins allow
capability that can be used by people now. Those instances
can then be shown to people who say one of my most hated
phrases, "What's the use case?"
simion314 - 1 hours ago
Plugin has advantages though, consider I don't need the built
in pdf in browser, if the pdf reader was a third party plugin
I could decide to not install or remove it, less code that I
do not use is better. Also we could have a few prf reader
plugins choices instead of having the one Google/Mozilla
chose. Anyway the people wanting Flash to be preserved do
not intend to built Flash apps but conserve the existing
ones, most of them could be run in the standalone player(I
think a few try to hook into the browser to get the url or
similar ,so those would fail as standalone)
roenxi - 36 minutes ago
Speaking as a clueless user; closed source plugins, sooner or
later, go away. Which is pretty painful. In the interim, the
big grief-causers are usually closed source plugins that
crash the host.Open source plugins cause a lot less grief.
Typically they don't have a feature I want. Often for legal
reasons and not technical, or because a proprietary vendor is
fighting back (eg; video patents the first case, Skype
protocol the second).The linux kernel is an example how an
open-source-only plugin system works technical wonders. A
very interesting case study was graphics drivers circa 2005.
The closed source drivers (essentially plugins) tethered the
linux community to the technically obsolete X server; and
would have crippled the kernel in a similar way if the kernel
devs had accepted closed source plugins.Apple did wonders
driving open standards on the web with the explicit
acknowledgement that popular closed source plugins were too
dangerous for their platform to implement [1].The issue here
is the one Stallman has been harping on since the dawn of
time - closed source is unmaintainable in an extremely
profound way.[1] https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-
flash/
jacquesm - 45 minutes ago
I hate Flash. And yet, I fully support an effort to open source
it. Just like I hate MS Word and would support an effort to open
source it.Open sourcing code does not carry any of the risks you
mention because those risks relate to browsers, not to Flash,
besides that the whole point is to 'make it live forever' so that
the millions upon millions of hours spent building Flash stuff
will not have been wasted.Open sourcing abandonware is exactly
the right thing to do.
wildbunny - 2 hours ago
Very narrow minded. Tens of thousands of games rely on flash,
along with many movies and general history of the internet. Open
souring it will preserve countless hours of lost work.
revelation - 2 hours ago
They are preserved, no ones making Commodores or GameBoys but I
can play all those games just fine. Spin up a XP VM if you want
the vintage Flash game experience.(Hello downvotes? It's true,
we preserve all of those things through virtual machines of one
variety or another. The Flash plugin doesn't magically stop
working because Adobe stops developing it.)
SomeStupidPoint - 50 minutes ago
....Don't both your examples work through opensource
emulators?Seems a weird thing to bring up for why we
shouldn't opensource a runtime to preserve content....
simion314 - 1 hours ago
You would have then to create a Flash VM, probably based on
Linux not XP, but you may have issues with 3d acceleration,
and it will consume a lot of extra resources. For now you can
use the standalone player for some flash content but that
could change in a few years and the player may not work in
new Windows or Linux releases.
yjftsjthsd-h - 16 minutes ago
I wonder if it works in ReactOS?
hk__2 - 2 hours ago
Ten of thousands of games are created every year.
StevePerkins - 2 hours ago
Tens of thousands of books are written each year. Tens of
thousands of songs are recorded each year. Etc. This is an
absurd line of reasoning.People get permission to build
Commodore 64 clones, for retro computing preservation, and
Hacker News says that's great. Someone requests similar
permission for Flash, and now we're upset about the notion of
a proprietary codebase being open sourced? Why? Because
Steve Jobs said it wasn't cool? Because you're seriously
afraid that it would make a comeback, and dethrone HTML5 on
the mainstream web?Guys, someone started a petition to ask a
company to donate a propriety codebase after EOL. That's
all. This is just idle chat, because nothing in Adobe's
history suggests that they would actually consider
this.Regardless, if you would rather NOT see a historically
signficant codebase open sourced, then simply don't sign the
petition. And take all the low-quality jokes and guffaws
back to Reddit, please.
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JustAnotherPat - 2 hours ago
I didn't know Flash devs had a union
karmaProtector - 1 hours ago
How are those people called who preserve their garbage?Well, I
am happy I never annoyed my fellow humans beings with any
flashy products and I would be happy if none of those flash
applets would survive 2020.To those who spend a lot of time
creating stuff with flash: You knew from the first day that
flash was a proprietary software... What happens now, is what
happens to all proprietary software one day. So please keep
that in mind when you start using the next one.I am truely
sorry to be so honest/mean today.
[deleted]
xupybd - 22 minutes ago
Did you actually make an account called KarmaProtector to say
something you knew would be downvoted?
ryanisnan - 57 minutes ago
You must be fun at parties.
zaklaus - 1 hours ago
I believe there should be an ability to create a secured
container to run some Flash content, which isn't critical.
wslh - 42 minutes ago
> No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing
will make it live forever.So does DOS, OS/2, CPM, AmigaOS, etc.
Let individuals decide what to do with the source code.
romwell - 39 minutes ago
>Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point
duplicated (or improved upon) by others.Pray, tell me of a
universally-supported compact interactive vector graphics
animation format, with sound, in a single file.Back in the year
2000 I could send a Valentine card with an animated message that
could be downloaded as an email attachment and kept forever.So,
what's the improved version of that?
niutech - 12 minutes ago
There are many:- (M)HTML with bundled/inlined SVG and
multimedia files.- SVG with embedded multimedia files (demo:
http://xn--dahlstrm-t4a.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg)-
PDF with embedded multimedia files
karmaProtector - 11 minutes ago
Zipped Website?
wolrah - 11 minutes ago
> universally-supportedI thought we're talking about Flash
here? You know, the thing that only works on a subset of
browsers on the three major desktop OSes and has absolutely
zero modern mobile support.Almost everything that has been done
with Flash falls in to one of two categories:1. Things that
should be done in standard and truly universal HTML5, generally
with assistance of Javascript, CSS, and SVGs. This includes
every single media player and most non-interactive or lightly
interactive animations, as well as all navigation elements for
a web site. Your valentine's card example is definitely in
this category.2. Things that should be done with a proper game
engine.There's a very small margin in between those two mostly
full of games too complicated to be practical in HTML+JS but
too simple to really be worth the effort of a full game engine.
Even that range is getting a lot smaller these days with the
number of high quality game engines available for free to
anyone who wants them.
egonschiele - 1 hours ago
Open source projects with no large company support or full-time
employees == no browser will want to continue to support
this.Open sourcing flash just means that devs who have spent
years building games in flash can still play those games. It is
still a death sentence for the future of flash.
banku_brougham - 1 hours ago
my first thought was 'wow now flash will finally be safe to allow
to run on my machine'.am i being naive?
Rusky - 1 hours ago
It's not about making it available for continued production use.
It's about archiving the content people created with it.That's
getting harder and harder to do as platforms get more and more
complicated. "Mostly" compatible is less than helpful. Having
access to the actual primary Flash implementation would be
invaluable for preservation efforts.
niutech - 1 hours ago
For archiving you can bundle the Flash runtime with SWF in a
standalone EXE file.
xupybd - 25 minutes ago
It won't be what it is today, it'll mean that it will live on as
a niche. There are large business applications written in Flex
that actually work well. The existing open-source Flash
alternatives will not serve these applications. It will cost
hundreds of thousands of dollars to port these applications and
bring little to no benefit to the organisations that use them.
0x0 - 2 hours ago
Browsers are removing plugin support either way, so I don't see
any harm in open sourcing the player.
spcelzrd - 1 hours ago
Flash is cancer. It literally retarded the growth of browser
technology by years.
gburt - 2 hours ago
Preservation and reduction of bit rot is a great reason to open
source Flash or ensure there is always a definitive version
available, even if all the browsers should ban it because it is a
messy, unperformant security liability.
mnem - 1 hours ago
Open sourcing it won't help preserve content - that's far more
effectively achieved via VMs and using the archived players
which Adobe provide (and will hopefully continue to provide or
allow preservation of on abandoware or other sites).Maintaining
the build systems, compatibility layers and so forth won't be
easy (Adobe often couldn't manage it), and bug fixing in the
code is a risky prospect for preservation as it could render
older content unplayable or differently playable.The swf file
format is almost open - it would be nice if Adobe updated the
published specification to the latest format. Again that would
go some way towards ensuring the content remained available in
some way.Edit: genuinely interested in the downvotes here - am
I missing something fundamental about content preservation? It
seems logical to me that the file spec being available +
original players is far more valuable than the source, as the
source will then bitrot without continuous maintenance. In
comparison the players will always run in the VMs.
simion314 - 1 hours ago
Not sure if you know but Adobe open source the Flex
framework, is now part of Apache and it continued to be used
in projects. If Flash and AIR could be open sourced, we could
ahve an alternative for GUI application development(nothing
wrong with choice) and AIR could compete with Electron
mnem - 52 minutes ago
I've had the misfortune to work with Flex - I really didn't
enjoy it. It was also incredibly difficult to make Flex
apps accessible in a meaningful way.AIR did hold promise,
but ultimately suffered from being terribly cumbersome to
extend when you wanted to access native features or
platform standard libraries (I've created several AIR
native extensions over the years).However, one of the big
problems with using Flex or AIR after Adobe have end-of-
lifed Flash is that you're going to lose access to the
content creation tools. There are some alternatives
(FlashDevelop and FDT for coding, I forget the name of the
attempt at an open source Flash timeline editor), but
nothing is close to being as good as Adobes own tools when
you want to.If you want to leverage knowledge of
ActionScript, people may be better off looking at something
like Haxe for cross platform gui app dev.
notacoward - 1 hours ago
> Preservation and reduction of bit rot is a great reason to
open source FlashIt's a reason, and a good point, but it's not
a good reason. Improving the already-open-source players would
be a better alternative. Adobe could even help facilitate
that, by documenting the interfaces and enough of the internals
so that other developers can achieve better compatibility. A
canonical sandboxed version would also achieve the goal of
preservation, without the security woes. Open-sourcing Flash is
would just ensure its continued use as it is today, crowding
out either of those efforts.
jacquesm - 42 minutes ago
> Improving the already-open-source players would be a
better alternative.The open source players could be improved
by comparing implementation with Adobe's once it is open
sourced.
znpy - 17 minutes ago
Adobe could donate the source code of the player and stop selling
development kit/toolchain.Developing a new toolchain might take
so long that it wouldn't make sense as a project.It seems a
reasonable compromise to me.
sergiotapia - 16 minutes ago
People want this to preserve internet culture. If Flash dies, a
very large part of the internet we love vanishes overnight.
niutech - 5 minutes ago
False. The standalone Flash Player will not suddenly stop
running. In fact, you will be able to open your SWF files for a
long time, just not in web browsers, but using Projector.exe or
Swiff Player.
pan69 - 54 minutes ago
Notice: The idea is not to save Flash Player, but to open
source Flash! What exactly is being referred to here? The Flash
authoring tool I assume? As in, the application that you install on
your desktop and use to create Flash animations with?I think a
better description of the purpose of this petition might be a good
idea. A lot of people conflate Flash and Flash Player.
roblabla - 47 minutes ago
No, they're talking about the player. But they don't want to save
it from doom, but instead to preserve it so all the current code
targeting flash can still potentially be used.Think of it like an
emulator. It would still be stripped from browsers, but you could
download the SWF and play it locally, in the "flash emulator".
Except it'd be based on the real thing, and as such, would
achieve perfect compat right away.