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Petition to open source Flash

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Re: Petition to open source Flash

#101

Post by flashplayer_exe »

karmaProtector wrote: post #95
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.

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…

Here you go have your license to be happy. Now let others have their "garbage" standalone flash player.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#102

Post by ryanisnan »

karmaProtector wrote: post #95
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.

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…

You must be fun at parties.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#103

Post by simion314 »

gamedna wrote: post #77

Flash has generated a tremendous amount of assets that will be lost. Preserving them for historical reasons is extremely important but i am far less interested in preserving the technology than preserving the idea or creation itself. I would love to see an effort around conversion or transcoding flash assets to other technologies. For example, flash movies being rendered to an open standard or flash games being autom…

To transcode all Flash content you need a similar amount of work as reimplementing Flash since you need to transcode all the functions, it is similar as Wine project is doing and it is always behind and there are bugs, having the source will help implementingt the translation.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#104

Post by baby »

mawburn wrote: post #73
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,…

It's ok to dislike something and recognize how poor it is compared to better implementations it helped inspire, but still respect what it did for us in the past. Flash, Java Applets, and jQuery all changed the web for the better and were amazing things at one time. But we should move on.

What's the point of moving on from jQuery? Does plain javascript now offers the same functionalities?

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#105

Post by notacoward »

simion314 wrote: post #55

I can't understand why people are against open sourcing some proprietary code, why would it affect you? If you hate Flash that much you will have the opportunity to see the source code and confirm that is bad. All the open source reimplementation are incomplete, so with the opening up of Flash the open source ones could have a look (if license allows) and finish the reimplementation.

> why would it affect you?

Security affects everyone. Even if I can keep my own machine uninfected, I can't do the same for my bank's machines. Nor can I do the same for random strangers whose machines get 0wned and then used to launch new attacks against me, my bank, and everyone else. Insecure software needs to be replaced by more secure software, not put on indefinite life support.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#106

Post by pan69 » 

    Notice: The idea is not to save Flash Player, but to open source Flash!
What exactly is being referred to here? The Flash authoring tool I assume? As in, the application that you install on your desktop and use to create Flash animations with?

I think a better description of the purpose of this petition might be a good idea. A lot of people conflate Flash and Flash Player.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#107

Post by niutech »

tarboreus wrote: post #76
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…

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

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.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#108

Post by captainmuon »

__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…

You could also argue in the opposite direction: Without a plugin architecture, you are at the mercy of the browser developers to implement a certain functionality.

If you need some native feature, browser vendors can force you to use a native app and thus go through their app store (think Safari on iOS). There is a large category of apps that you cannot make in HTML, for example anything truly P2P (not WebRTC, but based on real sockets). You can't make an IMAP client. You can't make a friend-to-friend file sharing tool, without a central server, that uses your Facebook and Google contacts to find peers (I've tried). You can't make the browser window partially-transparent or use native looking widgets. You can't burn a DVD. And if someone invents free-floating holograms, you can't add them to your page.

Granted, these examples are silly. The web is now a very capable platform. But vendors have always been steering what you can and cannot do based on business and other interests. It would be great to be able to break out of that, by having a kind of "C foreign function" interface for the web.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#109

Post by Miky »

xilni wrote: post #6

Dear god no, please just let it die, I don't care about Badger, Badger, snake or Flash hentai flash game nostalgia that much.

Just because a piece of culture isn't exactly to your particular taste doesn't mean it shouldn't be preserved and it should be impossible for anyone to experience it in the future. And besides, that's a really selective and disingenuous generalization of Flash. There are a huge number of important, interesting Flash games that are worth preserving for history's sake.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#110

Post by simion314 »

aarongolliver wrote: post #26
Anatidae wrote: post #13

There could be an issue of opening up even more security issues for people with Flash still installed. That, in turn, will likely lead to an all out campaign to remove Flash from everything possible (maybe not a bad thing at this point). But, honestly - Flash as a platform hasn't advanced much in quite a while. What it once offered - rich multimedia runtime engine across platforms - is either available in the browser…

There is an all out campaign to remove flash from everything possible. Soon it will be gone from every major browser and phone. That's exactly what this is in response to. Personally I just want to ensure there's a way for me to go back and look at all the work I did in high school. It's already a pain to figure out how to run my old SWF files, and soon it's going to be nearly impossible. Maybe I should just snapshot…

If you use the VM solution you probably need some open VM format, in case in a few years the current formats are dropped.
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