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Petition to open source Flash

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Re: Petition to open source Flash

#81

Post by mnem »

gburt wrote: post #46
notacoward wrote: post #19

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…

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.

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.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#82

Post by midnitewarrior »

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.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#83

Post by simion314 »

__s wrote: post #69
captainmuon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 spe…

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)

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#84

Post by mtgx »

captainmuon wrote: post #53
notacoward wrote: post #19

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…

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…

The only way to solve that implementation problem is to create competition, just like you have with HTML.

So the W3C would have to define "standard Flash specification" and then everyone would have to implement their own "Flash player". But ain't nobody got time for that.

If the "Flash player" had been a specification rather than a piece of standalone software from day one, I believe the overall security of the Flash players would have been way better.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#86

Post by simion314 »

revelation wrote: post #51
wildbunny wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are preserved, no ones making Commodores or GameBoys but I can play all those games just fine. Spin up a XP VM if you want the vintage Flash game experience. (Hello downvotes? It's true, we preserve all of those things through virtual machines of one variety or another. The Flash plugin doesn't magically stop working because Adobe stops developing it.)

You would have then to create a Flash VM, probably based on Linux not XP, but you may have issues with 3d acceleration, and it will consume a lot of extra resources. For now you can use the standalone player for some flash content but that could change in a few years and the player may not work in new Windows or Linux releases.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#88

Post by simion314 »

mnem wrote: post #81
gburt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 i…

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

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#89

Post by egonschiele »

notacoward wrote: post #19

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…

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.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#90

Post by ransom1538 »

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.
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