Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Petition to open source Flash

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 255 posts

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#161

Post by andai »

Houshalter wrote: post #20
mtgx wrote: post #5

Isn't Flash player's code super-messy by now? (a hint towards that could be all the vulnerabilities found for it every week). Open sourcing it would have to dramatically improve the code quality and in a relatively short period of time (2 years max), otherwise browser vendors would never go along with it (nor should they). Sounds like a daunting task, especially if no big organization/leader takes up the task of clea…

You don't necessarily need to fix all the bugs. It just needs to be sandboxed properly. In the extreme case you could compile it to web assembly and run it inside the browsers existing wasm sandbox. I think all the comments are missing the point. This is about preserving our digital history. A huge amount of content exists only in flash. It would be sad to see it all disappear. It's even being used in important AI re…

How come they won't open?

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#162

Post by 77pt77 »

niutech wrote: post #141
romwell wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

There are many: - (M)HTML with bundled/inlined SVG and multimedia files. - SVG with embedded multimedia files (demo: http://xn--dahlstrm-t4a.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg ) - PDF with embedded multimedia files

> PDF with embedded multimedia files

That a larger can of worms than flash itself.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#163

Post by jaimex2 »

Big star from me.

I never understood the hate flash got, sure it was abused by ads but to this date I have never seen the same level of animated and vibrant websites that were around in its peak.

Everything is the same old bootstrapped template now, its pretty boring.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#164

Post by heartbreak »

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?

There’s nothing wrong with jQuery. It’s a perfectly good library to use if that’s what you know. Get your code shipped.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#165

Post by SXX »

joezydeco wrote: post #15
mtgx wrote: post #5

Isn't Flash player's code super-messy by now? (a hint towards that could be all the vulnerabilities found for it every week). Open sourcing it would have to dramatically improve the code quality and in a relatively short period of time (2 years max), otherwise browser vendors would never go along with it (nor should they). Sounds like a daunting task, especially if no big organization/leader takes up the task of clea…

I had access to the FlashLite source code a while back, and it was a total disaster. I can't imagine how bad the mainline code is.

No matter how bad source code is it's will still make it much easier for other implementations to get better compatibility.

Plenty of people in game development used Scaleform and it's have much better compatibility than any open source Flash reimplementation while it's codebase is solid.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#166

Post by Houshalter »

andai wrote: post #161
Houshalter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't necessarily need to fix all the bugs. It just needs to be sandboxed properly. In the extreme case you could compile it to web assembly and run it inside the browsers existing wasm sandbox. I think all the comments are missing the point. This is about preserving our digital history. A huge amount of content exists only in flash. It would be sad to see it all disappear. It's even being used in important AI re…

How come they won't open?

I have no idea. Whenever I try to open the file, firefox and chrome just download it. It used to work fine.

(Also even back in the day some flash games had built in DRM that required contacting an external server to run. And I have no idea how to fix that.)

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#167

Post by ZenoArrow »

spcelzrd wrote: post #67
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…

Flash is cancer. It literally retarded the growth of browser technology by years.

Quite the opposite. Flash allowed creativity on the web to grow whilst the web was being held back by IE6.

Aside from experiments in user interfaces, creative hubs like Newgrounds, YouTube and Vimeo relied on Flash to promote user-generated content on the web. I'd even go as far as saying without Flash those sites may have never existed.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#168

Post by Ajedi32 »

phkahler wrote: post #159
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.

It does not need to be open source. Just save the plug-in along with your legacy browser and legacy OS and run it all on an emulator. Making it open source is an excuse to allow people to continue flash development in some way.

What if, rather than just play the Flash content, I want to write a tool to convert it to a different format? Or what if I want to port the player to a new platform, or compile it to WASM so I can run it in a browser? There are a lot of things open sourcing Flash would enable that just running it in a VM would not.

And also, why do you care if some people _do_ want to continue developing Flash? It's going to get removed from browsers either way. The mere existence of a Flash player on somebody's desktop somewhere is not a security liability for you.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#169

Post by bdcravens »

larsiusprime wrote: post #33
nradov wrote: post #28

Chances are that Flash contains licensed third-party IP and thus Adobe couldn't unilaterally open source it even if they wanted to.

True, but even a non-functional source dump with lots of the guts ripped out and redacted would be extremely useful for researchers and preservationists.

I suspect Adobe isn't interested in committing man hours to that process.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#170

Post by bdcravens »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #112

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.

Most of those games you're referring to are on mobile, and even Android hasn't received a Flash update in 4 years.
Post reply on HN