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Petition to open source Flash

github.com

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Re: Petition to open source Flash

#131

Post by notacoward »

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,…

As the currently-most-upvoted hater, I kind of agree. Flash was fantastic back in the day. I played many games and movies that way, and was thusly enriched. But the Sega Genesis was also great in its day. So was the vinyl record. Those days are gone. Flash has accrued negatives, which now outweigh the positives.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#132

Post by xupybd »

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 won't be what it is today, it'll mean that it will live on as a niche. There are large business applications written in Flex that actually work well. The existing open-source Flash alternatives will not serve these applications. It will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to port these applications and bring little to no benefit to the organisations that use them.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#133

Post by xupybd »

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…

Did you actually make an account called KarmaProtector to say something you knew would be downvoted?

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#134

Post by xupybd »

notacoward wrote: post #131
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,…

As the currently-most-upvoted hater, I kind of agree. Flash was fantastic back in the day. I played many games and movies that way, and was thusly enriched. But the Sega Genesis was also great in its day. So was the vinyl record. Those days are gone. Flash has accrued negatives, which now outweigh the positives.

Sega has emulators, vinyl record players still exist.

Open sourcing flash doesn't mean it will stay mainstream, it probably shouldn't. But there is valuable flash content. If they kill flash and don't open source it, the only way to run flash will be on old browsers possible in old operating systems. This will put a big burden on businesses requiring old flash apps.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#135

Post by znpy »

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…

Adobe could donate the source code of the player and stop selling development kit/toolchain.

Developing a new toolchain might take so long that it wouldn't make sense as a project.

It seems a reasonable compromise to me.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#136

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

simion314 wrote: post #86
revelation wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if it works in ReactOS?

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#137

Post by sergiotapia »

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…

People want this to preserve internet culture. If Flash dies, a very large part of the internet we love vanishes overnight.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#138

Post by mstade »

FWIW I posted[1] in the Flash EOL thread the other day that an Adobe employee told me years ago that licensing issues were the main hindrance to open sourcing the Flash player. (Another HN user who said they used to work for Adobe seems to back this up.) A lot of technology in the player was licensed and difficult to remove/refactor such that the player code could realistically be opened up, and there was little business incentive to invest resources into it. I'd imagine the incentives are even less now.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14850791

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#139

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

szatkus wrote: post #128
mgamache wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Even if it's dead it can be useful.

An appropriate thing to say in a discussion about Flash :)

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#140

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

simion314 wrote: post #110
aarongolliver wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just use a raw disk image? What format is there to lose?
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