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Petition to open source Flash

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Re: Petition to open source Flash

#111

Post by mnem »

simion314 wrote: post #88
mnem wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've had the misfortune to work with Flex - I really didn't enjoy it. It was also incredibly difficult to make Flex apps accessible in a meaningful way.

AIR did hold promise, but ultimately suffered from being terribly cumbersome to extend when you wanted to access native features or platform standard libraries (I've created several AIR native extensions over the years).

However, one of the big problems with using Flex or AIR after Adobe have end-of-lifed Flash is that you're going to lose access to the content creation tools. There are some alternatives (FlashDevelop and FDT for coding, I forget the name of the attempt at an open source Flash timeline editor), but nothing is close to being as good as Adobes own tools when you want to.

If you want to leverage knowledge of ActionScript, people may be better off looking at something like Haxe for cross platform gui app dev.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#112

Post by JohnTHaller »

No, you don't need your silly flash player to play free games in your web browser or offer to users at a payment plan and method of your choosing. We've got this great app store for you to use that only costs $100 a year to submit apps to and we keep 30% of all the money you make on your game.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#113

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

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.)

....Don't both your examples work through opensource emulators?

Seems a weird thing to bring up for why we shouldn't opensource a runtime to preserve content....

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#114

Post by roblabla »

pan69 wrote: post #106

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.

No, they're talking about the player. But they don't want to save it from doom, but instead to preserve it so all the current code targeting flash can still potentially be used.

Think of it like an emulator. It would still be stripped from browsers, but you could download the SWF and play it locally, in the "flash emulator". Except it'd be based on the real thing, and as such, would achieve perfect compat right away.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#115

Post by jacquesm »

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…

I hate Flash. And yet, I fully support an effort to open source it. Just like I hate MS Word and would support an effort to open source it.

Open sourcing code does not carry any of the risks you mention because those risks relate to browsers, not to Flash, besides that the whole point is to 'make it live forever' so that the millions upon millions of hours spent building Flash stuff will not have been wasted.

Open sourcing abandonware is exactly the right thing to do.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#117

Post by mawburn »

baby wrote: post #104
mawburn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For the most part for common tasks supporting IE10+, yes.

There are still some things it will do for you that can be tedious with vanilla and arguments could still be made to use it as a dependency. But imho, it should be treated more of as an optional dependency that you use when/if you need it, rather than a cross browser compatibility crutch.

http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ helped me out quite a bit as I transitioned away from using it for day to day. It's not exactly 1-to-1, but it helped ease the initial pain.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#118

Post by jacquesm »

notacoward wrote: post #98
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.

> 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 th…

> Improving the already-open-source players would be a better alternative.

The open source players could be improved by comparing implementation with Adobe's once it is open sourced.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#119

Post by wslh »

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…

> No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will make it live forever.

So does DOS, OS/2, CPM, AmigaOS, etc. Let individuals decide what to do with the source code.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#120

Post by yuhong »

hexmiles wrote: post #66
yuhong wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash is more complex than HTML/CSS/JS though.

are you sure? i worked with flash and actionscript, and i doubt they are more complex than html/css/js, personaly i think the contrary. What make more difficult the reimplementation is the abscence of a specification or a standard.

I am talking about the entire history of Flash from 1996 on.
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