191–200 of 255 posts
Even if this did happen I doubt browsers would support it (as already mentioned) If nostalgia is the problem, it would be far less effort to recompile those games into html5
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…
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> 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. The open source players could be improved by comparing implementation with Adobe's once it is open sourced.
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 that to happen. Maybe the people who are arguing that we should treat open source as an alternative to the trash can (which is pretty damn insulting to those of us who actually produce open-source software) could spend just a little bit of their obviously-copious free time lobbying to change that IP regime.
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…
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.
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The security issues with Flash are due to it being closed-source. Make it open-source and a lot of the problems that lead it to being EOLed will be solved.
Nonsense! Open source things like PHP, WordPress, Apache, and Linux are attacked constantly.
Think about how Google pressured Microsoft to fix a vulnerability when MS was too slow to respond[1]. That's the kind of crap you see with proprietary development.
Open source is just a flat-out better method of developing software, but especially so when it comes to patching vulnerabilities.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2015/01/02/google-posts-unpatched-m...
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Ten of thousands of games are created every year.
Tens of thousands of books are written each year. Tens of thousands of songs are recorded each year. Etc. This is an absurd line of reasoning. People get permission to build Commodore 64 clones, for retro computing preservation, and Hacker News says that's great. Someone requests similar permission for Flash, and now we're upset about the notion of a proprietary codebase being open sourced ? Why? Because Steve Jobs s…
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> Improving the already-open-source players would be a better alternative. The open source players could be improved by comparing implementation with Adobe's once it is open sourced.
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…
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 first place is because the reference implementation isn't open sourced. I'm pretty sure the maintainers of those projects will welcome such a move by Adobe, there is no innate right to some kind of 'protected space' for open source projects that purposefully aim to provide an open implementation of a closed source product. Obviously one of the risks of embarking on such a project is that the original may one day be open sourced.
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No, they're talking about the player. But they don't want to save it from doom, but instead to preserve it so all the current code targeting flash can still potentially be used. Think of it like an emulator. It would still be stripped from browsers, but you could download the SWF and play it locally, in the "flash emulator". Except it'd be based on the real thing, and as such, would achieve perfect compat right away.
You still will be able to run your SWF files after 2020 using the latest Flash Player Projector.exe.
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.