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Petition to open source Flash

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Re: Petition to open source Flash

#211

Post by nextlevelwizard »

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.

So instead of being able to make something that just runs flash content when you so choose to you want someone to compile and tend to VM image(s) that runs specific OS and specific browser. All major browsers will stop showing Flash content after it's end of life (that has been confirmed), so I see no harm with having some external software that could run flash games/animations/whatever from a local file.

Just like with Java it's the Flash in browser that sucks, not Flash in and of itself.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#212

Post by nextlevelwizard »

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…

What if someone finds flaw in opened source of Flash? If it's open sourced after it's end of life, then no one will get hurt.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#213

Post by nextlevelwizard »

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…

How about all the kids who made animations and games with Flash just because it was the only thing accessible enough?

Your reasoning about proprietary stuff is just plain stupid and made completely retrospectively. There is literally no reason why we shouldn't preserve this work just because some people don't see value in them.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#214

Post by nextlevelwizard »

notacoward wrote: post #105
simion314 wrote: post #55

I 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.

> why would it affect you? Security affects everyone. Even if I can keep my own machine uninfected, I can't do the same for my bank's machines. Nor can I do the same for random strangers whose machines get 0wned and then used to launch new attacks against me, my bank, and everyone else. Insecure software needs to be replaced by more secure software, not put on indefinite life support.

You do know that Chrome, Firefox, and Edge (at least) have all stated that they will drop support for flash as soon as it's EOL'd. So why again would open sourcing Flash after that point make a difference in your security?

Only thing you can argue is that if someone is using old out of date software they would be at risk, but they are already at risk. Open sourcing Flash would not make it any less secure if it's not being used anywhere anymore.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#215

Post by nextlevelwizard »

dhosek wrote: post #16

How about a petition to have Adobe put into all versions of Flash going forward code to disable the flash player on the EOL date so that the danger of security vulnerabilities from the damn thing will be greatly reduced.

Browser vendors are already dropping support, so there isn't much reason to double dip

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#216

Post by nextlevelwizard »

CrankyBear wrote: post #116

Really? Really!? All the years we've suffered with this, this insecure "Thing* and you want to give it eternal life in open source? Not just no, but hell no. You want video? Use HTML 5's Theora, H264, or WebM.

I take it you are going to convert all of the Flash videos into these formats for us?

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#217

Post by nextlevelwizard »

niutech wrote: post #99
Rusky wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about making it available for continued production use. It's about archiving the content people created with it. That's getting harder and harder to do as platforms get more and more complicated. "Mostly" compatible is less than helpful. Having access to the actual primary Flash implementation would be invaluable for preservation efforts.

For archiving you can bundle the Flash runtime with SWF in a standalone EXE file.

What about preserving Flash itself? Like it or not it is/was a big part of Internet history.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#220

Post by winter_blue »

mstade wrote: post #138

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 busi…

I assume it's patents that comprise the licensed technology? Does Flash contain code that has been licensed from other companies? If it's just patents, there's no problem in open-sourcing; on the other hand, I can see licensed code being a problem. But with all of the open-source implementations various codecs, gutting out the parts of Flash that contain the licensed code, and open-sourcing would be a viable option indeed.
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