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One thing I can't understand is why Adobe is so insistent on keeping Flash really actually dead by saying it's "unsupported" yet still keeping the sources to th

One thing I can't understand is why Adobe is so insistent on keeping Flash really actually dead by saying it's "unsupported" yet still keeping the sources to themselves. If they aren't gaining anything from it anyway, why can't they just open-source it? I mean they won't lose anything either by doing that, right? The community would fix all the bugs eventually. Probably quicker and better than Adobe, too.

kvark 5y ago
Doesn't give them anything. Even adds some risks that people sue them for copyright infringement. E.g. from using GPL projects.
- grishka 5y ago
  > E.g. from using GPL projects. Interesting — I just checked the standalone flash player I still have (and use sometimes), the "about" window doesn't list any free software. So either they aren't using any, or... But I find it unlikely that a company with this many lawyers would not read every letter of the license of every library they include in any of their projects.
  - georgemcbay 5y ago
    I've worked with the Flash Player source code in the far off past (I worked for a company called Chumby which licensed Adobe's Flash Player to power apps running in a device similar to the modern Amazon Dash Look) and while you would see things in that codebase that make your head spin, improper use of GPL libraries was not one of them.
cylon13 5y ago
As someone who got into game development by making Flash games as a kid, I would love to see Flash open sourced. I don't think it's necessarily true to say they have nothing to lose by open-sourcing it though. Who knows how many private shared libraries are in there that are still required by other still-active Adobe software. And they're also probably not excited to give up rights to a massive pile of code which they could conceivably want to use in future projects. In other words Flash likely isn't some isolated directory they can just zip and share to the world, and even if it is they might want to pick the bones later so why throw it away? (from their perspective)
- grishka 5y ago
  Can relate. Flash literally changed my life. I wouldn't have been the person I am without it. And my career path would've definitely been very different. I wouldn't have known most of my friends without those VKontakte Flash apps, because the connections to most of the people I know right now can be traced back to someone from that Flash app developer community. I'm somewhat hopeful that Ruffle will somehow drive its resurgence. Older versions of Flash (the authoring software) aren't that hard to find, and maybe in due time someone would even build an open-source reimplementation of that, too. The SWF format itself definitely won't ever be dead by any means.
- bsder 5y ago
  > As someone who got into game development by making Flash games as a kid, I would love to see Flash open sourced. Ruffle is open source and works. See: https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ What is missing that Ruffle doesn't cover?
  - grishka 5y ago
    ActionScript 3? Bitmap filters and blending modes? I tried throwing all the swf's I have laying around at it, and the older one is the more likely it will work. Some AS2 games are fully playable even. It'll get there eventually of course as it's very much WIP. I wonder when will it stop calling itself a "flash player emulator" tho. It plays flash files. It's literally a flash player.
    - bsder 5y ago
      > Bitmap filters and blending modes? This, in particular, is limited by manpower and reverse engineering. Simply documenting what Flash actually does would be a huge help. Volunteers welcome. Rendering flash requires that you be pixel compatible to something that is not documented anywhere. That requires someone to do a lot of experiments on something that barely runs anywhere anymore, document what they find, and then have someone convert that into code. As for Actionscript 3, here is the tracking issue: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/1368 https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/1368
slimsag 5y ago
Flash being dead, and yet many enterprises still relying on it, opens the opportunity for Adobe to sell a pricey contract that allows an enterprise servicing company to provide Flash support.
- cgarvis 5y ago
  Just looked into this with CheerpX. You need the CheerpX license (15k/yr) and Flash license (25-50k/yr).
  - _fat_santa 5y ago
    So the top comment mentions ruffle.rs which is basically the same thing as CheerpX without the insane licensing fee (correct me if I'm wrong). With that said why the hell would a company pay for this when there a good OSS alternative. Is it all about support and covering your ass from any lawsuits?
    - detaro 5y ago
      CheerpX is the actual Flash player virtualized. I haven't used it, but would expect that means something regarding reliability. And its customer segment probably doesn't bat an eye at that kind of pricing for something "properly supported", whatever that means for such a hack. Seriously, enterprise environments are often prepared to pay a lot for compatibility stuff/extended support/... ruffle.rs is a reimplementation, and YMMV, but none of the things I tried playing with it worked properly (although afaik plenty other things do) and still in active development.
nightfly 5y ago
Flash player is dead. Flash is still used for animation though, so they are still making money off it.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  Correct. It now goes by the name Adobe Animate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
cronix 5y ago
> I mean they won't lose anything either by doing that, right? Not directly, but if someone were to use some of that code that a company put significant resources into developing, in a product that made someone else money, most companies would probably have a hard time mentally justifying that.
- thayne 5y ago
  So license it as GPL, so that someone else would also have to make their source code public.
rsj_hn 5y ago
My guess is that to Adobe, "flash" was a set of authoring tools (developer IDE and bespoke language) and a runtime that allows execution in the browser. Adobe, as a company, sells authoring tools. It doesn't make money building runtimes and then giving them away. Even the money from licensing runtimes (Air) is insignificant. The runtime was just a necessary overhead due to inconsistent and poor native rendering capabilities in the browser - it existed solely to allow the development of powerful authoring tools. So after browsers improved their native support and announced they are dropping support for the plugin, Adobe migrated to a new version of the authoring tools (Adobe Animate) that can compile to the legacy flash player runtime if needed, but also to html/js, or svg, or other targets. They still want to sell more of the authoring tools. They don't particularly care about flash, and are probably happy to be rid of it. What they don't want is someone else taking control over the runtime and then building rival authoring tools for it, opening it up to other authoring tools, or creating any kind of rival authoring eco-system. It's like if you give away razors to sell your own blades, and then you come up with razor 2.0, you still don't want people taking the razor 1.0 and keeping it alive by selling their own blades for it, or even giving away their own blades for it, as then you would be in competition with yourself. Whether these business concerns are justified or not, or whether our IP laws are too extreme, is a separate question. These aren't simple questions.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Usually stems from lack of leadership. Different legal arms not knowing what the mission of the company is, etc.
kstrauser 5y ago
They may not be legally able to. It's likely that Flash includes some 3rd party code that they've licensed under commercial terms from other vendors and which they can't release.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  This is usually the real answer to why things aren't open-sourced when they become deprecated. The source code does sometimes "accidentally" leak, though.
- grishka 5y ago
  Can't they just rip out the 3rd party parts and let the community fill them in with already existing open-source alternatives?
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    It depends how big the missing piece is. First, let me be clear that I know nothing about Flash's internals. Everything I'm saying here is just as an example. But suppose Flash depended on a specific 3rd-party graphics engine, and a lot of Flash's own code was written to adapt and work around bugs in that code. Replacing it might mean either 1) making a clean graphics engine and rewriting a large part of Flash to work with it, or 2) implementing a bug-compatible engine. May instead of a graphics engine, it's a proprietary video codec, or a bytecode interpreter, or a network stack, or a sound library. Things like these are a big reason lots of projects aren't released as FOSS. Take something that looks simple on the outside, rip out its guts, and you're left with what exactly?
    - egypturnash 5y ago
      Definitely video codecs, at least: Flash Video FLV files usually contain material encoded with codecs following the Sorenson Spark or VP6 video compression formats. As of 2010 public releases of Flash Player (collaboration between Adobe Systems and MainConcept) also support H.264 video and HE-AAC audio.[3] All of these compression formats are restricted by patents. - Wikipedia’s page on FLV, the video format that YouTube was built around.

kvark 5y ago

Doesn't give them anything. Even adds some risks that people sue them for copyright infringement. E.g. from using GPL projects.

grishka 5y ago
> E.g. from using GPL projects. Interesting — I just checked the standalone flash player I still have (and use sometimes), the "about" window doesn't list any free software. So either they aren't using any, or... But I find it unlikely that a company with this many lawyers would not read every letter of the license of every library they include in any of their projects.
- georgemcbay 5y ago
  I've worked with the Flash Player source code in the far off past (I worked for a company called Chumby which licensed Adobe's Flash Player to power apps running in a device similar to the modern Amazon Dash Look) and while you would see things in that codebase that make your head spin, improper use of GPL libraries was not one of them.

cylon13 5y ago

As someone who got into game development by making Flash games as a kid, I would love to see Flash open sourced. I don't think it's necessarily true to say they have nothing to lose by open-sourcing it though. Who knows how many private shared libraries are in there that are still required by other still-active Adobe software. And they're also probably not excited to give up rights to a massive pile of code which they could conceivably want to use in future projects. In other words Flash likely isn't some isolated directory they can just zip and share to the world, and even if it is they might want to pick the bones later so why throw it away? (from their perspective)

grishka 5y ago
Can relate. Flash literally changed my life. I wouldn't have been the person I am without it. And my career path would've definitely been very different. I wouldn't have known most of my friends without those VKontakte Flash apps, because the connections to most of the people I know right now can be traced back to someone from that Flash app developer community. I'm somewhat hopeful that Ruffle will somehow drive its resurgence. Older versions of Flash (the authoring software) aren't that hard to find, and maybe in due time someone would even build an open-source reimplementation of that, too. The SWF format itself definitely won't ever be dead by any means.
bsder 5y ago
> As someone who got into game development by making Flash games as a kid, I would love to see Flash open sourced. Ruffle is open source and works. See: https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ What is missing that Ruffle doesn't cover?
- grishka 5y ago
  ActionScript 3? Bitmap filters and blending modes? I tried throwing all the swf's I have laying around at it, and the older one is the more likely it will work. Some AS2 games are fully playable even. It'll get there eventually of course as it's very much WIP. I wonder when will it stop calling itself a "flash player emulator" tho. It plays flash files. It's literally a flash player.
  - bsder 5y ago
    > Bitmap filters and blending modes? This, in particular, is limited by manpower and reverse engineering. Simply documenting what Flash actually does would be a huge help. Volunteers welcome. Rendering flash requires that you be pixel compatible to something that is not documented anywhere. That requires someone to do a lot of experiments on something that barely runs anywhere anymore, document what they find, and then have someone convert that into code. As for Actionscript 3, here is the tracking issue: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/1368 https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/1368

slimsag 5y ago

Flash being dead, and yet many enterprises still relying on it, opens the opportunity for Adobe to sell a pricey contract that allows an enterprise servicing company to provide Flash support.

cgarvis 5y ago
Just looked into this with CheerpX. You need the CheerpX license (15k/yr) and Flash license (25-50k/yr).
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  So the top comment mentions ruffle.rs which is basically the same thing as CheerpX without the insane licensing fee (correct me if I'm wrong). With that said why the hell would a company pay for this when there a good OSS alternative. Is it all about support and covering your ass from any lawsuits?
  - detaro 5y ago
    CheerpX is the actual Flash player virtualized. I haven't used it, but would expect that means something regarding reliability. And its customer segment probably doesn't bat an eye at that kind of pricing for something "properly supported", whatever that means for such a hack. Seriously, enterprise environments are often prepared to pay a lot for compatibility stuff/extended support/... ruffle.rs is a reimplementation, and YMMV, but none of the things I tried playing with it worked properly (although afaik plenty other things do) and still in active development.

nightfly 5y ago

Flash player is dead. Flash is still used for animation though, so they are still making money off it.

codetrotter 5y ago
Correct. It now goes by the name Adobe Animate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

cronix 5y ago

> I mean they won't lose anything either by doing that, right? Not directly, but if someone were to use some of that code that a company put significant resources into developing, in a product that made someone else money, most companies would probably have a hard time mentally justifying that.

thayne 5y ago
So license it as GPL, so that someone else would also have to make their source code public.

rsj_hn 5y ago

My guess is that to Adobe, "flash" was a set of authoring tools (developer IDE and bespoke language) and a runtime that allows execution in the browser. Adobe, as a company, sells authoring tools. It doesn't make money building runtimes and then giving them away. Even the money from licensing runtimes (Air) is insignificant. The runtime was just a necessary overhead due to inconsistent and poor native rendering capabilities in the browser - it existed solely to allow the development of powerful authoring tools. So after browsers improved their native support and announced they are dropping support for the plugin, Adobe migrated to a new version of the authoring tools (Adobe Animate) that can compile to the legacy flash player runtime if needed, but also to html/js, or svg, or other targets. They still want to sell more of the authoring tools. They don't particularly care about flash, and are probably happy to be rid of it. What they don't want is someone else taking control over the runtime and then building rival authoring tools for it, opening it up to other authoring tools, or creating any kind of rival authoring eco-system. It's like if you give away razors to sell your own blades, and then you come up with razor 2.0, you still don't want people taking the razor 1.0 and keeping it alive by selling their own blades for it, or even giving away their own blades for it, as then you would be in competition with yourself. Whether these business concerns are justified or not, or whether our IP laws are too extreme, is a separate question. These aren't simple questions.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Usually stems from lack of leadership. Different legal arms not knowing what the mission of the company is, etc.

kstrauser 5y ago

They may not be legally able to. It's likely that Flash includes some 3rd party code that they've licensed under commercial terms from other vendors and which they can't release.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
This is usually the real answer to why things aren't open-sourced when they become deprecated. The source code does sometimes "accidentally" leak, though.
grishka 5y ago
Can't they just rip out the 3rd party parts and let the community fill them in with already existing open-source alternatives?
- kstrauser 5y ago
  It depends how big the missing piece is. First, let me be clear that I know nothing about Flash's internals. Everything I'm saying here is just as an example. But suppose Flash depended on a specific 3rd-party graphics engine, and a lot of Flash's own code was written to adapt and work around bugs in that code. Replacing it might mean either 1) making a clean graphics engine and rewriting a large part of Flash to work with it, or 2) implementing a bug-compatible engine. May instead of a graphics engine, it's a proprietary video codec, or a bytecode interpreter, or a network stack, or a sound library. Things like these are a big reason lots of projects aren't released as FOSS. Take something that looks simple on the outside, rip out its guts, and you're left with what exactly?
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Definitely video codecs, at least: Flash Video FLV files usually contain material encoded with codecs following the Sorenson Spark or VP6 video compression formats. As of 2010 public releases of Flash Player (collaboration between Adobe Systems and MainConcept) also support H.264 video and HE-AAC audio.[3] All of these compression formats are restricted by patents. - Wikipedia’s page on FLV, the video format that YouTube was built around.