>Adobe let Flash languish after the purchase of Macromedia. They didn't just let it languish. They actively tried to enshittify the platform by charging a revs

>Adobe let Flash languish after the purchase of Macromedia. They didn't just let it languish. They actively tried to enshittify the platform by charging a revshare to game developers for using cross-compiled code with Stage3D. This was intended to stop Unity developers from just compiling Unity games to Flash and not paying for Flash CS6, except what it actually did was just push everyone to Unity's own browser plugin (and later HTML5 export). As for why they didn't FOSS it... well, they're still selling Adobe Animate. The player probably couldn't have been released as FOSS, because of all the various libraries in Flash Player that Macromedia and Adobe used[0]. Remember that proprietary software is more viral than the GPL. But they actually DID release a lot of FOSS during the AS3 days: the AS3 runtime and base class libraries were all Free Software, because Adobe and Mozilla were collaborating on it[1]. The intent was that AS3 would actually become "JavaScript 2.0" or ECMAScript 4! But this was killed off as being "too complex" and ES4 is just a weird alternate-universe ECMAScript spec. [0] AFAIK there's Sorenson Spark, some Samsung font rendering library, some DRM stuff, and a few other things [1] Originally they wanted to license the JVM but Sun was high on their "compatibility means compatibility" horse and said no. That's why ES4/AS3 has a lot of "Java-esque" features like namespaces and interfaces, and gets rid of prototype inheritance. None of that wound up getting forward-ported into the ES5+ fork of the timeline.