A bunch of us suggested this to Macromedia around 2005. Unfortunately, it never became a popular topic. Adobe took it over and well; turtles all the way down.
Petition to open source Flash
181–190 of 255 posts
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't believe what I'm seeing. People on HN don't want something to be open sourced? Is it opposite day?
Because it's Flash and their God Steve Jobs said that Flash was bad. It's really as simple as that.
I want to believe that you're not right, but you might be. I just can't understand why a massive proprietary codebase becoming open wouldn't be a Good Thing
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#183No 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 so…
Exactly, I can't believe the number of people in this thread suggesting that keeping it closed is somehow the right thing to do?
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Flash has emulators too. I think you just made my point.
Actually if there is a good emulator, I'm happy.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#185Earlier 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.
The SWF specification has been open for many years.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#186Earlier 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.
Between the options of open-sourcing an already-complete and canonically "correct" implementation, and having Adobe document their code and interfaces and improving the partial (but open) implementations that we have, it seems like the latter involves a lot more work. I guess I don't see the benefit.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#187No 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…
I don't have strong feelings on browser plugins vs no browser plugins, but I can say that I can now watch streaming video from the major services and play browser games on Linux now, and that wasn't possible a couple of years (or maybe a little more) ago. I welcome the end of Silverlight, Flash, Java applets, because it means I can use any modern browser to do anything I want on any platform I want (kinda, but it keeps getting more true over time).
Plugins aren't inherently Linux-incompatible it's just that for most of them Linux support was an afterthought or actively avoided for competitive reasons (in the case of Silverlight, I would guess). I don't miss fighting to make Flash work in a 64-bit browser, or having to set my user agent to claim I'm on Windows, to make something work (and have it break periodically for whatever reason).
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#188So 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.
If Sega suddenly open-sourced the Genesis hardware, all it would do is make the emulators better. It wouldn't make people start writing new Genesis games, or whatever it is you're worried about happening here. Whatever negatives there are to Flash, they would not be affected in any way by the player becoming open sourced.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#189I worked at Adobe near the Flash team back in the day, and the PMs I knew would have absolutely loved to open-source the Player. The problem isn't willingness, it's third-party code, of which there is apparently a lot.
If there was just a button to be pressed, Adobe would have pressed it circa 2010. But at this point, I think open-sourcing Flash Player is the kind of thing where the project to figure out what all would need to be done would cost more than Adobe would want to invest, never mind actually doing the necessary work (both engineering and legal).
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#190No 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…
"Time to get rid of Flash" sounds more like irrational attitude than anything approaching positive evolution of technology. We are meant to push technology forwards, fix it, make it better, find the positive aspects, not get on high-horses with brand-loyalty agendas about what should die and what sucks.