what about petitioning Google so they open source Swiffy ?
To me Google Chrome is the one responsible for killing Flash, Adobe is just playing catch up.
Petition to open source Flash
121–130 of 255 posts
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#122No 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…
>Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others.
Pray, tell me of a universally-supported compact interactive vector graphics animation format, with sound, in a single file.
Back in the year 2000 I could send a Valentine card with an animated message that could be downloaded as an email attachment and kept forever.
So, what's the improved version of that?
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#123I 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.
I can't believe what I'm seeing. People on HN don't want something to be open sourced? Is it opposite day?
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#124I would love to see what kind of Simcities are in that source code
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#125Earlier 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…
Speaking as a clueless user; closed source plugins, sooner or later, go away. Which is pretty painful. In the interim, the big grief-causers are usually closed source plugins that crash the host.
Open source plugins cause a lot less grief. Typically they don't have a feature I want. Often for legal reasons and not technical, or because a proprietary vendor is fighting back (eg; video patents the first case, Skype protocol the second).
The linux kernel is an example how an open-source-only plugin system works technical wonders. A very interesting case study was graphics drivers circa 2005. The closed source drivers (essentially plugins) tethered the linux community to the technically obsolete X server; and would have crippled the kernel in a similar way if the kernel devs had accepted closed source plugins.
Apple did wonders driving open standards on the web with the explicit acknowledgement that popular closed source plugins were too dangerous for their platform to implement [1].
The issue here is the one Stallman has been harping on since the dawn of time - closed source is unmaintainable in an extremely profound way.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#126No 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…
> An open source flash player will most likely be used standalone, and not in a browser.
It'll most likely be modified to run in browsers, too, e.g., via compilation to WebAssembly and suitable web-platform replacements for the low-level IO, etc., implementations.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#127Let flash die. We don't need it. We got HTML5.
No one who has used both significantly really thinks HTML5 can provide an equivalent alternative to the Flash platform today. Sure it can cover a lot of the common use cases and it can be made to work, but it's really a poor substitute (albeit without the security and other issues). HTML5 is the future, but it still needs work.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or https://github.com/mozilla/shumway which doesn't require any native code
Shumway is a dead project (hasn't been updated for a while). Too bad, because it showed promise.
Last time I tried it was working surprisingly well. Even if it's dead it can be useful.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#129Aren't more of recent application for Flash is to deliver DRMed video while rest moving to something else like HTML5. If this is the case opensource Flash won't really help...
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#130Again. 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…
That's not going away, though. Adobe Animate isn't being EOL'ed.