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Petition to open source Flash

560 points by pkstn 9y ago

prodikl 9y ago
ActionScript is still loved by the Starling community. I don't really think i'll miss the swf format, though
- bdcravens 9y ago
  Adobe Animate isn't being EOL'ed.
nradov 9y 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 9y 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.
  - bdcravens 9y ago
    I suspect Adobe isn't interested in committing man hours to that process.
- lj3 9y 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 9y 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.
- matt_kantor 9y ago
  Right. This is mentioned near the top of TFA: > We understand that there are licenced components you can not release. Simply leave them out with a note explaining what was removed. We will either bypass them, or replace them with open source alternatives. As bdcravens and ghaff allude to elsewhere in this subthread, the question is whether Adobe can be convinced to put in the effort required to strip out licensed IP. Maybe a crowdfunded campaign with a bounty to cover Adobe's costs would be more compelling than a slacktivist petition like TFA.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  For example the several video codecs. But I think all of those are supported by VLC, for instance.
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
Yikes. How about a petition to burn it with fire? Petition to erase all mention of flash from history books?
yuhong 9y ago
This will probably take years of course. Hopefully the H.264 patents will expire at least not long afterwards.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sureste 9y ago
I support this. In 20 years when no one is using it anymore and the source code is released for academic purposes.
nkkollaw 9y ago
Why not contribute to well-established open source Flash players? http://lightspark.github.io/ http://lightspark.github.io/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
- leeter 9y ago
  Or https://github.com/mozilla/shumway https://github.com/mozilla/shumway which doesn't require any native code
  - mgamache 9y ago
    Shumway is a dead project (hasn't been updated for a while). Too bad, because it showed promise.
    - fmoralesc 9y ago
      It can be forked and continued.
    - szatkus 9y ago
      Last time I tried it was working surprisingly well. Even if it's dead it can be useful.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
        > Even if it's dead it can be useful. An appropriate thing to say in a discussion about Flash :)
- StevePerkins 9y ago
  Because they're all alpha-level, and will probably always be to Flash what ReactOS is to Windows.
  - nkkollaw 9y 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?
mtgx 9y 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.
- yuhong 9y ago
  It probably still would not be enabled by default.
- tbodt 9y ago
  Flash doesn't have to be shipped with browsers. You could always install it manually.
- esMazer 9y ago
  it'd be so embarrassing that it'll never happen
- captn3m0 9y ago
  How about just open sourcing pepper flash to start with? That has fewer security issues, if I understand it correctly.
- joezydeco 9y 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.
  - SXX 9y ago
    No matter how bad source code is it's will still make it much easier for other implementations to get better compatibility. Plenty of people in game development used Scaleform and it's have much better compatibility than any open source Flash reimplementation while it's codebase is solid.
- 9y ago
xilni 9y 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.
- gburt 9y 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_.
- pat_space 9y ago
  What about the end of the world? Are you le tired?
  - xilni 9y ago
    Yes, most definitely le tired of having to deal with Flash.
- Miky 9y 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.
dim13 9y ago
Let it go gracefully.
Anatidae 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago
      Just use a raw disk image? What format is there to lose?
      - simion314 9y ago
        VirtualBox uses an XML file that stores your VM settings, and for disks there are a few options,for my work I use the disks that grow (so I set the disk to 100Gb but if I use 20 Gb now it will use 20Gb of my real disk space)
        9y ago
dhosek 9y 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.
- nextlevelwizard 9y ago
  Browser vendors are already dropping support, so there isn't much reason to double dip
joe_momma 9y ago
There should just be a Flash only browser with an HTML5 blocker muhahaha.
notacoward 9y 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.
- 0x0 9y ago
  Browsers are removing plugin support either way, so I don't see any harm in open sourcing the player.
- gburt 9y 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 9y 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.
jayflux 9y 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
- Qwertious 9y ago
  Recompiling the games into html5 would be far easier if we had source-code to reverse-engineer to create a translator with.
simion314 9y 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 9y 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.
- notacoward 9y 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.
  - nextlevelwizard 9y ago
    You do know that Chrome, Firefox, and Edge (at least) have all stated that they will drop support for flash as soon as it's EOL'd. So why again would open sourcing Flash after that point make a difference in your security? Only thing you can argue is that if someone is using old out of date software they would be at risk, but they are already at risk. Open sourcing Flash would not make it any less secure if it's not being used anywhere anymore.
    - notacoward 9y ago
      Do you suppose that nobody will use the open-source version of Flash to make a spin of Chromium with Flash support, to serve the very kind of people who just can't seem to live without their legacy apps? If the browsers are open source and Flash is open source, millions of systems will be left vulnerable in this way.
jarym 9y 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!
- Ajedi32 9y 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.
- riffraff 9y 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.
- mawburn 9y 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 9y ago
    What's the point of moving on from jQuery? Does plain javascript now offers the same functionalities?
    - 9y ago
xyzxyz998 9y ago
The chances of being this taken seriously are 0.
c4ncri 9y ago
Let flash die. We don't need it. We got HTML5.
- mgamache 9y 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.
rbanffy 9y ago
Please, let it die.
imagetic 9y ago
Let it die.
scj 9y 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.
gamedna 9y 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 9y 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.
  - gamedna 9y ago
    Wine is an emulator, hence the name. (WINdows Emulator) By transcoding I am referring to rendering the flash content in a completely new medium. For example videos could be rendered using the existing closed source implementation into an open source video codec/format. For the interactive flash content, the content creators have the option of porting it to another platform to preserve the idea. Adobe even provides a tool to assist with this (https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/how-to/convert-flash-ads-to-html5.html https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/how-to/convert-flash-ads-to-...) Finally transcoding would recompile the framework into another framework. Think of this as converting Flash/Actionscript into HTML5 Canvas/Javascript.
    - apt-gett 9y ago
      (W)ine (I)s (N)ot an (E)mulator It's a compatibility layer.
      - 9y ago
ram_rar 9y ago
Its already open sourced. Its called HTML5!
aylmao 9y 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 9y 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.
midnitewarrior 9y 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.
cgb223 9y ago
There are a ton of Black Hat hackers who would love to see this petition become real Shut it down, the internet is massively more secure without flash
ransom1538 9y 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 9y ago
  That's not going away, though. Adobe Animate isn't being EOL'ed.
  - ransom1538 9y ago
    Hopefully! However, I doubt Adobe will continue flash IDE support - while taking down the flash browser plugin. I expect an announcement soon.
- rachkovsky 9y ago
  Code is art too.
kahlonel 9y ago
I would do anything to preserve those white buttons with glowy green borders.
flashplayer_exe 9y ago
Browser vendors are already disabling flash by default. There is no need to "kill" anything. Even if it were opensourced today it will still meet the same fate. The only people who care about open sourcing are those who want a standalone flash player for archival purposes. Gnash works pretty well with non AS3 noninteractive movies and looping swfs. Most games are still broken though.
bricss 9y ago
Burn it to hell ∆
pan69 9y 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 9y 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.
  - niutech 9y ago
    You still will be able to run your SWF files after 2020 using the latest Flash Player Projector.exe.
    - pan69 9y ago
      That's what I thought as well. All the latest versions are here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer.html http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer.html
    - firmgently 9y ago
      To play a .swf you can use the standalone Flash Player. A projector is a different thing, it's a special .exe version of the .swf with the Flash Player bundled at compile time. So the concept of using the latest projector to view an old .swf doesn't make sense. Sorry for the pedantry but that's the third time I've read it used incorrectly on this thread.
      - niutech 9y ago
JohnTHaller 9y 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.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  Most of those games you're referring to are on mobile, and even Android hasn't received a Flash update in 4 years.
CrankyBear 9y 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.
- nextlevelwizard 9y ago
  I take it you are going to convert all of the Flash videos into these formats for us?
zwetan 9y 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.
odammit 9y ago
I would love to see what kind of Simcities are in that source code
unsignedint 9y 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...
mstade 9y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14850791
- winter_blue 9y ago
  I assume it's patents that comprise the licensed technology? Does Flash contain code that has been licensed from other companies? If it's just patents, there's no problem in open-sourcing; on the other hand, I can see licensed code being a problem. But with all of the open-source implementations various codecs, gutting out the parts of Flash that contain the licensed code, and open-sourcing would be a viable option indeed.
  - mstade 9y ago
    It's been years, so take this with a truckload of salt, but if I recall correctly the issue was licensed code, along with a mostly ad-hoc structure of the player which meant extracting this would be difficult without a total rewrite, which is hard enough as is to justify but probably even more so when there's no clear business incentive for it. As well, a rewrite means considerable risk to breaking old content, which Adobe (and before them Macromedia) worked pretty hard not to do. I can see why this wasn't very palatable. As I said though, it's been years and I'm just relaying what I can recall so I may very well be getting things wrong.
- matt_kantor 9y ago
  I said this already in another comment, but for this reason I think a crowdfunded campaign with a bounty that Adobe can use to cover their costs would be more likely to succeed than a simple petition. Such a campaign could also send a much stronger signal of how badly people actually want an open source flash player. Starring a repo is too easy; it's better to let folks put money where their mouth is. Imagine if the hypothetical campaign raises a million dollars. It'd be hard for Adobe to ignore.
Animats 9y ago
Just for historical reasons, it's good to have the source out there. Fifty or a hundred years from now, someone may want very badly to recover some old .swf file.
jaimex2 9y ago
Big star from me. I never understood the hate flash got, sure it was abused by ads but to this date I have never seen the same level of animated and vibrant websites that were around in its peak. Everything is the same old bootstrapped template now, its pretty boring.
BatFastard 9y ago
You have to understand the source of the problem. The browsers do NOT want to support this level of plug-in since it is less secure. That is why the Unity plug-in went away, that is why ALL plugs ins are going away. Flash is still alive as AIR in mobile and desktop. But it is DEAD in browsers.
Brajeshwar 9y ago
A bunch of us suggested this to Macromedia around 2005. Unfortunately, it never became a popular topic. Adobe took it over and well; turtles all the way down.
fenomas 9y ago
I worked at Adobe near the Flash team back in the day, and the PMs I knew would have absolutely loved to open-source the Player. The problem isn't willingness, it's third-party code, of which there is apparently a lot. If there was just a button to be pressed, Adobe would have pressed it circa 2010. But at this point, I think open-sourcing Flash Player is the kind of thing where the project to figure out what all would need to be done would cost more than Adobe would want to invest, never mind actually doing the necessary work (both engineering and legal).
adaml2017 9y ago
yes! great idea. Also quick observation, Flash is so hard to get rid of because it's still a very useful tool. We're lucky to have had it in the 2000's
madshiva 9y ago
If you want save flash, just install an virtual machine with WinXP and stay in the past. Too much website still use flash.. come on they have been warned so many times, flash must die.
pkstn 9y ago
The idea is not to preserve Flash player as is, but to open source Flash spec to make it possible to archive all the good stuff out there!
mirekrusin 9y ago
"So Adobe, you're killing Flash now. That's fine since you apparently can't fix it." Seriously, why start with sentences like that if you really care about it being open-sourced?
- pkstn 9y ago
  Changed it, thanks for the comment!
mirekrusin 9y ago
"So Adobe, you're killing Flash now. That's fine since you apparently can't fix it." Seriously, why start with sentences like that if you really care about it being open-sourced?
covamalia 9y ago
Just let it die!
rhabarba 9y ago
Where can I sign a petition to let Javascript die before 2020?
Popster 9y ago
I'm all for a Flash emulator that emulates the functions that Flash currently has, but do not start an open source project that adds more functions and security issues and whatnot. Any further development must be stopped.
dorado13 9y ago
Sometimes it is hard to say "goo bye". But we have to. Like growing kids, we should stock our kid's stuff in an old chest and forget about it. If someone really wants to reminisce or something like this, save your own local copy of flash and use it as u want. But in face of web community such things like flash really have to die. Thus how new directions of web will born.
brockvond 9y ago
me personally, I love this idea and would work on this in spare time as long as my bottle of TUMS is within arms reach. Very Cool, Very Cool.

560 points by pkstn 9y ago

prodikl 9y ago

ActionScript is still loved by the Starling community. I don't really think i'll miss the swf format, though

bdcravens 9y ago
Adobe Animate isn't being EOL'ed.

nradov 9y 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 9y 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.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  I suspect Adobe isn't interested in committing man hours to that process.
lj3 9y 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 9y 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.
matt_kantor 9y ago
Right. This is mentioned near the top of TFA: > We understand that there are licenced components you can not release. Simply leave them out with a note explaining what was removed. We will either bypass them, or replace them with open source alternatives. As bdcravens and ghaff allude to elsewhere in this subthread, the question is whether Adobe can be convinced to put in the effort required to strip out licensed IP. Maybe a crowdfunded campaign with a bounty to cover Adobe's costs would be more compelling than a slacktivist petition like TFA.
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
For example the several video codecs. But I think all of those are supported by VLC, for instance.

omarforgotpwd 9y ago

Yikes. How about a petition to burn it with fire? Petition to erase all mention of flash from history books?

yuhong 9y ago

This will probably take years of course. Hopefully the H.264 patents will expire at least not long afterwards.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

sureste 9y ago

I support this. In 20 years when no one is using it anymore and the source code is released for academic purposes.

nkkollaw 9y ago

Why not contribute to well-established open source Flash players? http://lightspark.github.io/ http://lightspark.github.io/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

leeter 9y ago
Or https://github.com/mozilla/shumway https://github.com/mozilla/shumway which doesn't require any native code
- mgamache 9y ago
  Shumway is a dead project (hasn't been updated for a while). Too bad, because it showed promise.
  - fmoralesc 9y ago
    It can be forked and continued.
  - szatkus 9y ago
    Last time I tried it was working surprisingly well. Even if it's dead it can be useful.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
      > Even if it's dead it can be useful. An appropriate thing to say in a discussion about Flash :)
StevePerkins 9y ago
Because they're all alpha-level, and will probably always be to Flash what ReactOS is to Windows.
- nkkollaw 9y 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?

mtgx 9y 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.

yuhong 9y ago
It probably still would not be enabled by default.
tbodt 9y ago
Flash doesn't have to be shipped with browsers. You could always install it manually.
esMazer 9y ago
it'd be so embarrassing that it'll never happen
captn3m0 9y ago
How about just open sourcing pepper flash to start with? That has fewer security issues, if I understand it correctly.
joezydeco 9y 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.
- SXX 9y ago
  No matter how bad source code is it's will still make it much easier for other implementations to get better compatibility. Plenty of people in game development used Scaleform and it's have much better compatibility than any open source Flash reimplementation while it's codebase is solid.
9y ago

xilni 9y 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.

gburt 9y 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_.
pat_space 9y ago
What about the end of the world? Are you le tired?
- xilni 9y ago
  Yes, most definitely le tired of having to deal with Flash.
Miky 9y 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.

dim13 9y ago

Let it go gracefully.

Anatidae 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago
    Just use a raw disk image? What format is there to lose?
    - simion314 9y ago
      VirtualBox uses an XML file that stores your VM settings, and for disks there are a few options,for my work I use the disks that grow (so I set the disk to 100Gb but if I use 20 Gb now it will use 20Gb of my real disk space)
      - 9y ago

dhosek 9y 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.

nextlevelwizard 9y ago
Browser vendors are already dropping support, so there isn't much reason to double dip

joe_momma 9y ago

There should just be a Flash only browser with an HTML5 blocker muhahaha.

notacoward 9y 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.

0x0 9y ago
Browsers are removing plugin support either way, so I don't see any harm in open sourcing the player.
gburt 9y 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 9y 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.

jayflux 9y 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

Qwertious 9y ago
Recompiling the games into html5 would be far easier if we had source-code to reverse-engineer to create a translator with.

simion314 9y 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 9y 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.
notacoward 9y 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.
- nextlevelwizard 9y ago
  You do know that Chrome, Firefox, and Edge (at least) have all stated that they will drop support for flash as soon as it's EOL'd. So why again would open sourcing Flash after that point make a difference in your security? Only thing you can argue is that if someone is using old out of date software they would be at risk, but they are already at risk. Open sourcing Flash would not make it any less secure if it's not being used anywhere anymore.
  - notacoward 9y ago
    Do you suppose that nobody will use the open-source version of Flash to make a spin of Chromium with Flash support, to serve the very kind of people who just can't seem to live without their legacy apps? If the browsers are open source and Flash is open source, millions of systems will be left vulnerable in this way.

jarym 9y 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!

Ajedi32 9y 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.
riffraff 9y 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.
mawburn 9y 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 9y ago
  What's the point of moving on from jQuery? Does plain javascript now offers the same functionalities?
  - 9y ago

xyzxyz998 9y ago

The chances of being this taken seriously are 0.

c4ncri 9y ago

Let flash die. We don't need it. We got HTML5.

mgamache 9y 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.

rbanffy 9y ago

Please, let it die.

imagetic 9y ago

Let it die.

scj 9y 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.

gamedna 9y 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 9y 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.
- gamedna 9y ago
  Wine is an emulator, hence the name. (WINdows Emulator) By transcoding I am referring to rendering the flash content in a completely new medium. For example videos could be rendered using the existing closed source implementation into an open source video codec/format. For the interactive flash content, the content creators have the option of porting it to another platform to preserve the idea. Adobe even provides a tool to assist with this (https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/how-to/convert-flash-ads-to-html5.html https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/how-to/convert-flash-ads-to-...) Finally transcoding would recompile the framework into another framework. Think of this as converting Flash/Actionscript into HTML5 Canvas/Javascript.
  - apt-gett 9y ago
    (W)ine (I)s (N)ot an (E)mulator It's a compatibility layer.
    - 9y ago

ram_rar 9y ago

Its already open sourced. Its called HTML5!

aylmao 9y 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 9y 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.

midnitewarrior 9y 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.

cgb223 9y ago

There are a ton of Black Hat hackers who would love to see this petition become real Shut it down, the internet is massively more secure without flash

ransom1538 9y 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 9y ago
That's not going away, though. Adobe Animate isn't being EOL'ed.
- ransom1538 9y ago
  Hopefully! However, I doubt Adobe will continue flash IDE support - while taking down the flash browser plugin. I expect an announcement soon.
rachkovsky 9y ago
Code is art too.

kahlonel 9y ago

I would do anything to preserve those white buttons with glowy green borders.

flashplayer_exe 9y ago

Browser vendors are already disabling flash by default. There is no need to "kill" anything. Even if it were opensourced today it will still meet the same fate. The only people who care about open sourcing are those who want a standalone flash player for archival purposes. Gnash works pretty well with non AS3 noninteractive movies and looping swfs. Most games are still broken though.

bricss 9y ago

Burn it to hell ∆

pan69 9y 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 9y 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.
- niutech 9y ago
  You still will be able to run your SWF files after 2020 using the latest Flash Player Projector.exe.
  - pan69 9y ago
    That's what I thought as well. All the latest versions are here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer.html http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer.html
  - firmgently 9y ago
    To play a .swf you can use the standalone Flash Player. A projector is a different thing, it's a special .exe version of the .swf with the Flash Player bundled at compile time. So the concept of using the latest projector to view an old .swf doesn't make sense. Sorry for the pedantry but that's the third time I've read it used incorrectly on this thread.
    - niutech 9y ago

JohnTHaller 9y 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.

bdcravens 9y ago
Most of those games you're referring to are on mobile, and even Android hasn't received a Flash update in 4 years.

CrankyBear 9y 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.

nextlevelwizard 9y ago
I take it you are going to convert all of the Flash videos into these formats for us?

zwetan 9y 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.

odammit 9y ago

I would love to see what kind of Simcities are in that source code

unsignedint 9y 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...

mstade 9y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14850791

winter_blue 9y ago
I assume it's patents that comprise the licensed technology? Does Flash contain code that has been licensed from other companies? If it's just patents, there's no problem in open-sourcing; on the other hand, I can see licensed code being a problem. But with all of the open-source implementations various codecs, gutting out the parts of Flash that contain the licensed code, and open-sourcing would be a viable option indeed.
- mstade 9y ago
  It's been years, so take this with a truckload of salt, but if I recall correctly the issue was licensed code, along with a mostly ad-hoc structure of the player which meant extracting this would be difficult without a total rewrite, which is hard enough as is to justify but probably even more so when there's no clear business incentive for it. As well, a rewrite means considerable risk to breaking old content, which Adobe (and before them Macromedia) worked pretty hard not to do. I can see why this wasn't very palatable. As I said though, it's been years and I'm just relaying what I can recall so I may very well be getting things wrong.
matt_kantor 9y ago
I said this already in another comment, but for this reason I think a crowdfunded campaign with a bounty that Adobe can use to cover their costs would be more likely to succeed than a simple petition. Such a campaign could also send a much stronger signal of how badly people actually want an open source flash player. Starring a repo is too easy; it's better to let folks put money where their mouth is. Imagine if the hypothetical campaign raises a million dollars. It'd be hard for Adobe to ignore.

Animats 9y ago

Just for historical reasons, it's good to have the source out there. Fifty or a hundred years from now, someone may want very badly to recover some old .swf file.

jaimex2 9y ago

Big star from me. I never understood the hate flash got, sure it was abused by ads but to this date I have never seen the same level of animated and vibrant websites that were around in its peak. Everything is the same old bootstrapped template now, its pretty boring.

BatFastard 9y ago

You have to understand the source of the problem. The browsers do NOT want to support this level of plug-in since it is less secure. That is why the Unity plug-in went away, that is why ALL plugs ins are going away. Flash is still alive as AIR in mobile and desktop. But it is DEAD in browsers.

Brajeshwar 9y ago

A bunch of us suggested this to Macromedia around 2005. Unfortunately, it never became a popular topic. Adobe took it over and well; turtles all the way down.

fenomas 9y ago

I worked at Adobe near the Flash team back in the day, and the PMs I knew would have absolutely loved to open-source the Player. The problem isn't willingness, it's third-party code, of which there is apparently a lot. If there was just a button to be pressed, Adobe would have pressed it circa 2010. But at this point, I think open-sourcing Flash Player is the kind of thing where the project to figure out what all would need to be done would cost more than Adobe would want to invest, never mind actually doing the necessary work (both engineering and legal).

adaml2017 9y ago

yes! great idea. Also quick observation, Flash is so hard to get rid of because it's still a very useful tool. We're lucky to have had it in the 2000's

madshiva 9y ago

If you want save flash, just install an virtual machine with WinXP and stay in the past. Too much website still use flash.. come on they have been warned so many times, flash must die.

pkstn 9y ago

The idea is not to preserve Flash player as is, but to open source Flash spec to make it possible to archive all the good stuff out there!

mirekrusin 9y ago

"So Adobe, you're killing Flash now. That's fine since you apparently can't fix it." Seriously, why start with sentences like that if you really care about it being open-sourced?

pkstn 9y ago
Changed it, thanks for the comment!

mirekrusin 9y ago

"So Adobe, you're killing Flash now. That's fine since you apparently can't fix it." Seriously, why start with sentences like that if you really care about it being open-sourced?

covamalia 9y ago

Just let it die!

rhabarba 9y ago

Where can I sign a petition to let Javascript die before 2020?

Popster 9y ago

I'm all for a Flash emulator that emulates the functions that Flash currently has, but do not start an open source project that adds more functions and security issues and whatnot. Any further development must be stopped.

dorado13 9y ago

Sometimes it is hard to say "goo bye". But we have to. Like growing kids, we should stock our kid's stuff in an old chest and forget about it. If someone really wants to reminisce or something like this, save your own local copy of flash and use it as u want. But in face of web community such things like flash really have to die. Thus how new directions of web will born.

brockvond 9y ago

me personally, I love this idea and would work on this in spare time as long as my bottle of TUMS is within arms reach. Very Cool, Very Cool.