Why not contribute to well-established open source Flash players? http://lightspark.github.io/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
> The latest beta release of Gnash has been made at version 0.8.10 in mid Feb, 2012.
Petition to open source Flash
221–230 of 255 posts
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just use a raw disk image? What format is there to lose?
VirtualBox uses an XML file that stores your VM settings, and for disks there are a few options,for my work I use the disks that grow (so I set the disk to 100Gb but if I use 20 Gb now it will use 20Gb of my real disk space)
That's fair, but the XML is probably non-essential, and I believe there are already open source converters for most disk image formats. There's some risk, but I don't think it's very much.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#223No 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…
Right, just let it R.I.P and we will miss it rather than living with the nightmare daily.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
You still will be able to run your SWF files after 2020 using the latest Flash Player Projector.exe.
To play a .swf you can use the standalone Flash Player. A projector is a different thing, it's a special .exe version of the .swf with the Flash Player bundled at compile time . So the concept of using the latest projector to view an old .swf doesn't make sense. Sorry for the pedantry but that's the third time I've read it used incorrectly on this thread.
According to the official Adobe Flash downloads page (https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...), Projector is also known as standalone Flash player:
> Adobe Flash Player 26 (Win, Mac & Linux) debugger (aka debug player or content debuggers) and standalone (aka projectors) players for Flex and Flash developers.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, I can't believe the number of people in this thread suggesting that keeping it closed is somehow the right thing to do?
Well, its pretty simple. Why should people be against open-sourcing it? I think 90% of those who are against it, are against it, because they want to forget flash and never see it again. So somehow, they must have made so bad experiences with flash, that they do not want to get it for free or even someone else to get it. So you next question is probably: What could have been such a bad experience? Probably not a just…
> Good experiences with flash:
>
> [1 item]
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Do you suppose that nobody will use the open-source version of Flash to make a spin of Chromium with Flash support, to serve the very kind of people who just can't seem to live without their legacy apps? If the browsers are open source and Flash is open source, millions of systems will be left vulnerable in this way.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
svg is not streamable nor does complex animations well. E.g. try make a fire or particle effect with SVG
Of course you can make a nice SVG fire:
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that would also work in the sense of improving compatibility, but it would still leave the other players competing with Adobe's own. Eventually they might prevail, due to being less security-bug-ridden, but in the interim we'd still be worse off. Also, this whole discussion is moot because open-sourcing Flash ain't gonna happen. I can practically guarantee that it's too entangled with other companies' IP for tha…
> but it would still leave the other players competing with Adobe's own. You have that backwards. The effort going into open source projects emulating a closed source product are wasted if that closed source project can be open sourced. That's a win for everybody, after that the effort can be directed to something more important because perfection is now attainable. The only reason these open source projects exist in…
> The effort going into open source projects emulating a closed source product are wasted if that closed source project can be open sourced.
Yeah, that Linux thing just died when Solaris was open-sourced. Even more relevantly, IE and Chrome.
> perfection is now attainable.
That's cute. As somebody who has actually produced software for thirty years (but without ever hitching my wagon to Flash like some here) I'm a bit more skeptical about the likelihood of taking a gigantic long-lived ball of mud and making it perfect. In particular, security is hard to bolt on after the fact. I certainly wouldn't assume that the maintainers of other implementations would be overjoyed by the prospect. Just look at how many reimplementations there are of things that were already open source. I'd say it's unlikely that a significant number of people will work on Flash without being paid to do so.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#229FWIW 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 i…
It's been years, so take this with a truckload of salt, but if I recall correctly the issue was licensed code, along with a mostly ad-hoc structure of the player which meant extracting this would be difficult without a total rewrite, which is hard enough as is to justify but probably even more so when there's no clear business incentive for it. As well, a rewrite means considerable risk to breaking old content, which Adobe (and before them Macromedia) worked pretty hard not to do. I can see why this wasn't very palatable.
As I said though, it's been years and I'm just relaying what I can recall so I may very well be getting things wrong.
Re: Petition to open source Flash
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had the misfortune to work with Flex - I really didn't enjoy it. It was also incredibly difficult to make Flex apps accessible in a meaningful way. AIR did hold promise, but ultimately suffered from being terribly cumbersome to extend when you wanted to access native features or platform standard libraries (I've created several AIR native extensions over the years). However, one of the big problems with using Fl…
I would not start a new project in Flex/AIR but I am stil bug fixing existing projects. I use Intelli IDEA, I do not need the drag and drop GUI editor I learned how to make good layouts editing the XML and it is much more simpler to layout components using Flex(or other GUI toolkits , I used Qt and WPF ) then using divs and css(thought he new flexbox in css improved the situation), So in Flex(Qt,and others) you have…
I tend to use the native UI for each platform I work on. My general opinion of cross platform UI frameworks these days is that they for developer convenience - they don't help the users. However I'm also aware that persuading the budget holder that users are worth spending money on is hard :)
For the drop downs - when I used Flex I had the same issues over window bounds, in that nothing could extend beyond the limits of the flash rendered window. Did they fix that in later versions?