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Petition to open source Flash

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Re: Petition to open source Flash

#91

Post by banku_brougham »

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…

my first thought was 'wow now flash will finally be safe to allow to run on my machine'.

am i being naive?

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#93

Post by tjoff »

jarym wrote: post #57

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,…

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.

And the web is much worse because of it.

The one thing that was excellent about flash was that you could easily disable it and all the security issues and annoying crap would disappear. You can't do that today without breaking stuff.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#94

Post by simion314 »

nkkollaw wrote: post #2

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

IF Adobe open source it with a good license would make the live easier to the other projects, you could probably reimplement 80% of Flash without problems just by using the API documentation but the rest of 20% will be harder, having the code would solve this.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#95

Post by karmaProtector »

wildbunny wrote: post #25
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…

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.

How are those people called who preserve their garbage?

Well, I am happy I never annoyed my fellow humans beings with any flashy products and I would be happy if none of those flash applets would survive 2020.

To those who spend a lot of time creating stuff with flash: You knew from the first day that flash was a proprietary software... What happens now, is what happens to all proprietary software one day. So please keep that in mind when you start using the next one.

I am truely sorry to be so honest/mean today.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#96

Post by flashplayer_exe »

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.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#97

Post by simion314 »

nkkollaw wrote: post #43
btown wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ignores all legacy Flash applications, which were designed for the original player (bugs and all). These are the legacy that need to be preserved. Presumably (though I'd love to see counterexamples) most people using Adobe Animate CC (the latest version and rebrand of Flash) these days are targeting HTML5 anyways.

Ah, I see. Then I guess the bugs can be taken into account like Firefox did with IE6? Perhaps having a compatibility-mode on/off so that new movies could follow the standard.

I think movies and animations are not the problem, those would be easy to playback if the codecs are right, there are planty of games, some 3d, and some interactive applications that use Flash and Flex, there are tons of APIs that Flash supports and implementing all of those exactly as in Flash was a huge task for the community, since Flash is not used in new projects just as legacy very few developers are interested in working on that in their free time.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#98

Post by notacoward »

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.

> 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.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#99

Post by niutech »

Rusky wrote: post #64
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…

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.

For archiving you can bundle the Flash runtime with SWF in a standalone EXE file.
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