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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 (

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.
  - simion314 9y 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 9y 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.
      - simion314 9y ago
        I would not start a new project in Flex/AIR but I am stil bug fixing existing projects. I use Intelli IDEA, I do not need the drag and drop GUI editor I learned how to make good layouts editing the XML and it is much more simpler to layout components using Flex(or other GUI toolkits , I used Qt and WPF ) then using divs and css(thought he new flexbox in css improved the situation), So in Flex(Qt,and others) you have components like listboxes, dropdowns, DataGrids that are very flexible , you want an item to look different you create an item renderer and reimplement the paint method in AS3 or if is simple enough in plain XML(or using the GUI Designer) In HTML5 land you do not have such flexible components as standard so you need to find an open source or buy this compoenents or implement one. You can say it is easy to implement a dropdown(built in one can't show icons and can't be customized), you hack some divs,lis and some css and it is done. But later you find that you did not consider corner cases, your implementation opens outside of the screen if dropdown is on the bottom of the page, the dropdown has no property where you can ask "show max 6 element, probably you did not add all the standard hover effects, and not implemented all the events, My point is that in Flex and other toolkits you can do a good GUI with good layout using the built in stuff and no hacks(I am thinking at css where some obvious thing did not worked for me until I found on SO that I need to set min-width to 0 so the css engine finding this useless rule would take a different path and display the expected thing). Can you share what GUI toolkits you used and what features you loved from each one? Thanks
- notacoward 9y ago
  > Preservation and reduction of bit rot is a great reason to open source Flash It'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.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    > Improving the already-open-source players would be a better alternative. Between the options of open-sourcing an already-complete and canonically "correct" implementation, and having Adobe document their code and interfaces and improving the partial (but open) implementations that we have, it seems like the latter involves a lot more work. I guess I don't see the benefit.
  - jacquesm 9y 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.
    - notacoward 9y ago
      Yes, that would also work in the sense of improving compatibility, but it would still leave the other players competing with Adobe's own. Eventually they might prevail, due to being less security-bug-ridden, but in the interim we'd still be worse off. Also, this whole discussion is moot because open-sourcing Flash ain't gonna happen. I can practically guarantee that it's too entangled with other companies' IP for that to happen. Maybe the people who are arguing that we should treat open source as an alternative to the trash can (which is pretty damn insulting to those of us who actually produce open-source software) could spend just a little bit of their obviously-copious free time lobbying to change that IP regime.
- niutech 9y ago
  Dop not worry. The SWF files will be preserved and long playable after 2020, using Flash Projector, Swiff Player or iSwiff. Just no longer in web browsers.
- Iv 9y ago
  And I must add that open sourcing it would clear up a lot of situation where the distribution of flash player had an unclear status.
djhworld 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago
    > I wonder when we'll start seeing Flash emulators being developed to play back all that old content. http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/ http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/
    - tbodt 9y ago
      Last commit was made in March 2016.
    - SolarNet 9y 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.
  - niutech 9y ago
    Of course there are many: Flash Projector, Swiff Player, iSwiffy, Eltima SWF Player, Gnash...
wildbunny 9y 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.
- hk__2 9y ago
  Ten of thousands of games are created every year.
  - melling 9y ago
    I'm hoping enough people flag this story so it's removed from the front page, and we can get back to more important stories. BTW, don't bother debating this because you'll simply be downvoted for a different opinion. Flag it off the front page and save your karma. It's time for Flash users to learn the having the web based off of closed source Adobe Flash really does have its downsides. They didn't seem to get it 10 years ago. Now it's going to disappear completely. So, in the future when someone patiently explains why you shouldn't used closed source as a web standard, maybe we can all say "remember Flash".
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - StevePerkins 9y 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.
captainmuon 9y 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.)
- __s 9y 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 browser In theory we could create a basic browser with various HTML/JS/CSS spec features created as a plugin
  - simion314 9y 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)
  - captainmuon 9y ago
zaklaus 9y ago
I believe there should be an ability to create a secured container to run some Flash content, which isn't critical.
Rusky 9y 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 9y ago
  For archiving you can bundle the Flash runtime with SWF in a standalone EXE file.
  - nextlevelwizard 9y ago
    What about preserving Flash itself? Like it or not it is/was a big part of Internet history.
spcelzrd 9y ago
Flash is cancer. It literally retarded the growth of browser technology by years.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Quite the opposite. Flash allowed creativity on the web to grow whilst the web was being held back by IE6. Aside from experiments in user interfaces, creative hubs like Newgrounds, YouTube and Vimeo relied on Flash to promote user-generated content on the web. I'd even go as far as saying without Flash those sites may have never existed.
tarboreus 9y ago
This is off base. Flash will die regardless, but making it open source will make it possible to preserve internet history.
- niutech 9y ago
  Flash will not be further developed by 2020, but it does not mean the Flash Player suddenly will stop running the SWF files. You will still be able to play them using Flash Projector.
egonschiele 9y 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 9y ago
my first thought was 'wow now flash will finally be safe to allow to run on my machine'. am i being naive?
jacquesm 9y 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.
- chickenfries 9y ago
  Exactly, I can't believe the number of people in this thread suggesting that keeping it closed is somehow the right thing to do?
  - karmaProtector 9y ago
    Well, its pretty simple. Why should people be against open-sourcing it? I think 90% of those who are against it, are against it, because they want to forget flash and never see it again. So somehow, they must have made so bad experiences with flash, that they do not want to get it for free or even someone else to get it. So you next question is probably: What could have been such a bad experience? Probably not a just one. From my own memory: Good experiences with flash: - youtube, etc.: Flash was overcoming the codec problem we had in the past. By providing a minimal set of supported codecs it was setting a defacto standard for video streaming. But that problem is solved today. Bad experinces with flash: - Flash menus (please install that macromedia plugin before you can actually use this website) - Flash menus (please wait until this uber cool animation finishes to render before you can click on that link) - Complete 'websites' in flash (Please install that plugin before you can see if this website is of any use at all) - Header logos with large file sizes, as they are animated like hell - a laggy computer just because some website embeded a flash animation which uses all of your CPU power - Contact forms which disallowed copy and paste. - Websites which you could not find again because the search engine could not find them. - decisions about being vulnerable vs. actually seeing flash content at all - tracking cookies beyond normal cookies - extra applets which are there just to make sure you are a real browser. So I think nobody has a real problem with those gift cards or the games. But given the history of flash we would better not receive a gift, just to make sure we will never have to experience those moments again.
wslh 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago
  There are many: - (M)HTML with bundled/inlined SVG and multimedia files. - SVG with embedded multimedia files (demo: http://dahlström.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg http://xn--dahlstrm-t4a.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg) - PDF with embedded multimedia files
  - 77pt77 9y ago
    > PDF with embedded multimedia files That a larger can of worms than flash itself.
    - ygra 9y ago
      PDF can also contain Flash, so you get the same can of worms, just nested ;-)
  - est 9y ago
    svg is not streamable nor does complex animations well. E.g. try make a fire or particle effect with SVG
    - niutech 9y ago
      Of course you can make a nice SVG fire: https://codepen.io/jkantner/full/eWGBBa/ https://codepen.io/jkantner/full/eWGBBa/ https://codepen.io/steveg3003/full/oZXmdL/ https://codepen.io/steveg3003/full/oZXmdL/
- karmaProtector 9y ago
xupybd 9y 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.
znpy 9y 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 9y ago
People want this to preserve internet culture. If Flash dies, a very large part of the internet we love vanishes overnight.
- niutech 9y 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.
k__ 9y ago
What is a real alternative? What tech can do what Flash does and is as easy and approachable as Flash for non-developers? I mean sure with WebGL and mad computer graphic skills no problem, but with out?
- stevekemp 9y ago
  I want to say "Java Applets", but that feels like trolling. Really flash had its place for animations, games, and sound/video stuff. There isn't any single alternative, although a lot of things it was used for can be supported directly nowadays. (Things like using the clipboard, etc.)
flashman 9y ago
The security issues with Flash are due to it being closed-source. Make it open-source and a lot of the problems that lead it to being EOLed will be solved.
- 80211 9y ago
  Nonsense! Open source things like PHP, WordPress, Apache, and Linux are attacked constantly.
  - ebcode 9y ago
    Sure, but they're also being defended constantly by armies of programmers. When a vulnerability is discovered, the four projects you mentioned are all awfully quick to issue and distribute patches. Think about how Google pressured Microsoft to fix a vulnerability when MS was too slow to respond[1]. That's the kind of crap you see with proprietary development. Open source is just a flat-out better method of developing software, but especially so when it comes to patching vulnerabilities. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2015/01/02/google-posts-unpatched-microsoft-bug/ https://www.engadget.com/2015/01/02/google-posts-unpatched-m...
smoyer 9y ago
I went to the Github page specifically to vote against this petition ... Using the star is more of a bookmark to me but it certainly doesn't provide a way to down vote the idea.
est 9y ago
> Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others How about streamable vector animation without hogging your CPU like HTML5 canvas or svg? (Zing!) And also, authoring tools that guaranteed to work everywhere as you draw graphs.
exodust 9y ago
"Time to get rid of Flash" sounds more like irrational attitude than anything approaching positive evolution of technology. We are meant to push technology forwards, fix it, make it better, find the positive aspects, not get on high-horses with brand-loyalty agendas about what should die and what sucks.
giancarlostoro 9y ago
The true purpose to open sourcing Flash is archiving / making it impossible to never be able to revisit Flash sites which are a huge part of internet history, e.g. NewGrounds and other sites.
nextlevelwizard 9y ago
What if someone finds flaw in opened source of Flash? If it's open sourced after it's end of life, then no one will get hurt.
vdchuyen 9y ago
Right, just let it R.I.P and we will miss it rather than living with the nightmare daily.
kerkeslager 9y ago
Wasn't this basically what people said about Netscape pre-Firefox? That worked out, and ushered in a new age of Internet. Flash has an immense amount of value built in which cannot be replaced by any of the alternatives. Maintaining and fixing old code isn't as sexy as jumping on the latest competing standard, but it's far more valuable. Even if we don't continue to develop new features for Flash, it's important to keep it alive so we don't lose the ability to run the wide variety of flash programs which at this point make up a significant portion of Internet culture and history.
odbol_ 9y ago
Flash has very little to offer as a tool, but as a platform with thousands of hours of beautiful, creative content made for it (Homestar Runner, games, interactive art, etc), it will be tragic to lose all that art and history. If we open-source Flash, at least museums will have an option to preserve that content for future generations to learn from and enjoy.

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.
- simion314 9y 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 9y 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.
    - simion314 9y ago
      I would not start a new project in Flex/AIR but I am stil bug fixing existing projects. I use Intelli IDEA, I do not need the drag and drop GUI editor I learned how to make good layouts editing the XML and it is much more simpler to layout components using Flex(or other GUI toolkits , I used Qt and WPF ) then using divs and css(thought he new flexbox in css improved the situation), So in Flex(Qt,and others) you have components like listboxes, dropdowns, DataGrids that are very flexible , you want an item to look different you create an item renderer and reimplement the paint method in AS3 or if is simple enough in plain XML(or using the GUI Designer) In HTML5 land you do not have such flexible components as standard so you need to find an open source or buy this compoenents or implement one. You can say it is easy to implement a dropdown(built in one can't show icons and can't be customized), you hack some divs,lis and some css and it is done. But later you find that you did not consider corner cases, your implementation opens outside of the screen if dropdown is on the bottom of the page, the dropdown has no property where you can ask "show max 6 element, probably you did not add all the standard hover effects, and not implemented all the events, My point is that in Flex and other toolkits you can do a good GUI with good layout using the built in stuff and no hacks(I am thinking at css where some obvious thing did not worked for me until I found on SO that I need to set min-width to 0 so the css engine finding this useless rule would take a different path and display the expected thing). Can you share what GUI toolkits you used and what features you loved from each one? Thanks
notacoward 9y ago
> Preservation and reduction of bit rot is a great reason to open source Flash It'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.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  > Improving the already-open-source players would be a better alternative. Between the options of open-sourcing an already-complete and canonically "correct" implementation, and having Adobe document their code and interfaces and improving the partial (but open) implementations that we have, it seems like the latter involves a lot more work. I guess I don't see the benefit.
- jacquesm 9y 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.
  - notacoward 9y ago
    Yes, that would also work in the sense of improving compatibility, but it would still leave the other players competing with Adobe's own. Eventually they might prevail, due to being less security-bug-ridden, but in the interim we'd still be worse off. Also, this whole discussion is moot because open-sourcing Flash ain't gonna happen. I can practically guarantee that it's too entangled with other companies' IP for that to happen. Maybe the people who are arguing that we should treat open source as an alternative to the trash can (which is pretty damn insulting to those of us who actually produce open-source software) could spend just a little bit of their obviously-copious free time lobbying to change that IP regime.
niutech 9y ago
Dop not worry. The SWF files will be preserved and long playable after 2020, using Flash Projector, Swiff Player or iSwiff. Just no longer in web browsers.
Iv 9y ago
And I must add that open sourcing it would clear up a lot of situation where the distribution of flash player had an unclear status.

djhworld 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago
  > I wonder when we'll start seeing Flash emulators being developed to play back all that old content. http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/ http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/
  - tbodt 9y ago
    Last commit was made in March 2016.
  - SolarNet 9y 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.
- niutech 9y ago
  Of course there are many: Flash Projector, Swiff Player, iSwiffy, Eltima SWF Player, Gnash...

wildbunny 9y 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.

hk__2 9y ago
Ten of thousands of games are created every year.
- melling 9y ago
  I'm hoping enough people flag this story so it's removed from the front page, and we can get back to more important stories. BTW, don't bother debating this because you'll simply be downvoted for a different opinion. Flag it off the front page and save your karma. It's time for Flash users to learn the having the web based off of closed source Adobe Flash really does have its downsides. They didn't seem to get it 10 years ago. Now it's going to disappear completely. So, in the future when someone patiently explains why you shouldn't used closed source as a web standard, maybe we can all say "remember Flash".
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- StevePerkins 9y 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.

captainmuon 9y 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.)

__s 9y 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 browser In theory we could create a basic browser with various HTML/JS/CSS spec features created as a plugin
- simion314 9y 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)
- captainmuon 9y ago

zaklaus 9y ago

I believe there should be an ability to create a secured container to run some Flash content, which isn't critical.

Rusky 9y 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 9y ago
For archiving you can bundle the Flash runtime with SWF in a standalone EXE file.
- nextlevelwizard 9y ago
  What about preserving Flash itself? Like it or not it is/was a big part of Internet history.

spcelzrd 9y ago

Flash is cancer. It literally retarded the growth of browser technology by years.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
Quite the opposite. Flash allowed creativity on the web to grow whilst the web was being held back by IE6. Aside from experiments in user interfaces, creative hubs like Newgrounds, YouTube and Vimeo relied on Flash to promote user-generated content on the web. I'd even go as far as saying without Flash those sites may have never existed.

tarboreus 9y ago

This is off base. Flash will die regardless, but making it open source will make it possible to preserve internet history.

niutech 9y ago
Flash will not be further developed by 2020, but it does not mean the Flash Player suddenly will stop running the SWF files. You will still be able to play them using Flash Projector.

egonschiele 9y 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 9y ago

my first thought was 'wow now flash will finally be safe to allow to run on my machine'. am i being naive?

jacquesm 9y 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.

chickenfries 9y ago
Exactly, I can't believe the number of people in this thread suggesting that keeping it closed is somehow the right thing to do?
- karmaProtector 9y ago
  Well, its pretty simple. Why should people be against open-sourcing it? I think 90% of those who are against it, are against it, because they want to forget flash and never see it again. So somehow, they must have made so bad experiences with flash, that they do not want to get it for free or even someone else to get it. So you next question is probably: What could have been such a bad experience? Probably not a just one. From my own memory: Good experiences with flash: - youtube, etc.: Flash was overcoming the codec problem we had in the past. By providing a minimal set of supported codecs it was setting a defacto standard for video streaming. But that problem is solved today. Bad experinces with flash: - Flash menus (please install that macromedia plugin before you can actually use this website) - Flash menus (please wait until this uber cool animation finishes to render before you can click on that link) - Complete 'websites' in flash (Please install that plugin before you can see if this website is of any use at all) - Header logos with large file sizes, as they are animated like hell - a laggy computer just because some website embeded a flash animation which uses all of your CPU power - Contact forms which disallowed copy and paste. - Websites which you could not find again because the search engine could not find them. - decisions about being vulnerable vs. actually seeing flash content at all - tracking cookies beyond normal cookies - extra applets which are there just to make sure you are a real browser. So I think nobody has a real problem with those gift cards or the games. But given the history of flash we would better not receive a gift, just to make sure we will never have to experience those moments again.

wslh 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago
There are many: - (M)HTML with bundled/inlined SVG and multimedia files. - SVG with embedded multimedia files (demo: http://dahlström.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg http://xn--dahlstrm-t4a.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg) - PDF with embedded multimedia files
- 77pt77 9y ago
  > PDF with embedded multimedia files That a larger can of worms than flash itself.
  - ygra 9y ago
    PDF can also contain Flash, so you get the same can of worms, just nested ;-)
- est 9y ago
  svg is not streamable nor does complex animations well. E.g. try make a fire or particle effect with SVG
  - niutech 9y ago
    Of course you can make a nice SVG fire: https://codepen.io/jkantner/full/eWGBBa/ https://codepen.io/jkantner/full/eWGBBa/ https://codepen.io/steveg3003/full/oZXmdL/ https://codepen.io/steveg3003/full/oZXmdL/
karmaProtector 9y ago

xupybd 9y 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.

znpy 9y 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 9y ago

People want this to preserve internet culture. If Flash dies, a very large part of the internet we love vanishes overnight.

niutech 9y 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.

k__ 9y ago

What is a real alternative? What tech can do what Flash does and is as easy and approachable as Flash for non-developers? I mean sure with WebGL and mad computer graphic skills no problem, but with out?

stevekemp 9y ago
I want to say "Java Applets", but that feels like trolling. Really flash had its place for animations, games, and sound/video stuff. There isn't any single alternative, although a lot of things it was used for can be supported directly nowadays. (Things like using the clipboard, etc.)

flashman 9y ago

The security issues with Flash are due to it being closed-source. Make it open-source and a lot of the problems that lead it to being EOLed will be solved.

80211 9y ago
Nonsense! Open source things like PHP, WordPress, Apache, and Linux are attacked constantly.
- ebcode 9y ago
  Sure, but they're also being defended constantly by armies of programmers. When a vulnerability is discovered, the four projects you mentioned are all awfully quick to issue and distribute patches. Think about how Google pressured Microsoft to fix a vulnerability when MS was too slow to respond[1]. That's the kind of crap you see with proprietary development. Open source is just a flat-out better method of developing software, but especially so when it comes to patching vulnerabilities. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2015/01/02/google-posts-unpatched-microsoft-bug/ https://www.engadget.com/2015/01/02/google-posts-unpatched-m...

smoyer 9y ago

I went to the Github page specifically to vote against this petition ... Using the star is more of a bookmark to me but it certainly doesn't provide a way to down vote the idea.

est 9y ago

> Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others How about streamable vector animation without hogging your CPU like HTML5 canvas or svg? (Zing!) And also, authoring tools that guaranteed to work everywhere as you draw graphs.

exodust 9y ago

"Time to get rid of Flash" sounds more like irrational attitude than anything approaching positive evolution of technology. We are meant to push technology forwards, fix it, make it better, find the positive aspects, not get on high-horses with brand-loyalty agendas about what should die and what sucks.

giancarlostoro 9y ago

The true purpose to open sourcing Flash is archiving / making it impossible to never be able to revisit Flash sites which are a huge part of internet history, e.g. NewGrounds and other sites.

nextlevelwizard 9y ago

What if someone finds flaw in opened source of Flash? If it's open sourced after it's end of life, then no one will get hurt.

vdchuyen 9y ago

Right, just let it R.I.P and we will miss it rather than living with the nightmare daily.

kerkeslager 9y ago

Wasn't this basically what people said about Netscape pre-Firefox? That worked out, and ushered in a new age of Internet. Flash has an immense amount of value built in which cannot be replaced by any of the alternatives. Maintaining and fixing old code isn't as sexy as jumping on the latest competing standard, but it's far more valuable. Even if we don't continue to develop new features for Flash, it's important to keep it alive so we don't lose the ability to run the wide variety of flash programs which at this point make up a significant portion of Internet culture and history.

odbol_ 9y ago

Flash has very little to offer as a tool, but as a platform with thousands of hours of beautiful, creative content made for it (Homestar Runner, games, interactive art, etc), it will be tragic to lose all that art and history. If we open-source Flash, at least museums will have an option to preserve that content for future generations to learn from and enjoy.