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Petition to open source Flash

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Re: Petition to open source Flash

#71

Post by IncRnd »

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…

If you like your flash plugins, don't delete them.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#72

Post by mgamache »

leeter wrote: post #31
nkkollaw wrote: post #2

Why not contribute to well-established open source Flash players? http://lightspark.github.io/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

Or https://github.com/mozilla/shumway which doesn't require any native code

Shumway is a dead project (hasn't been updated for a while). Too bad, because it showed promise.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#73

Post by mawburn »

jarym wrote: post #57

So 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,…

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.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#74

Post by scj »

Open sourcing code allows a new vector for finding vulnerabilities. Just because the software reaches its EOL doesn't mean it is removed from every computer.

I believe that open sourcing Flash should be done for the sake of software preservation. But I would recommend 2025 (end of life for Windows 10 and IE11) as the earliest release date.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#75

Post by watwut »

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.

Hate does not have to be rational - just as any other emotion. It also does not matter whether flash code quality is good or bad. It influences nothing at this point. They want it bad, so they will see it bad. And since all bigger projects have dirty places here and there, flash is pretty much guaranteed to have some too.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#76

Post by tarboreus »

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…

This is off base. Flash will die regardless, but making it open source will make it possible to preserve internet history.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#77

Post by gamedna »

Flash has generated a tremendous amount of assets that will be lost. Preserving them for historical reasons is extremely important but i am far less interested in preserving the technology than preserving the idea or creation itself. I would love to see an effort around conversion or transcoding flash assets to other technologies. For example, flash movies being rendered to an open standard or flash games being automatically converted to javascript/html5. The content creator deserve to have their legacy recorded and maintained but this is not the solution. (granted it may be a solution for other use cases, but i am not sure what those are)

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#79

Post by aylmao »

I learned to program in ActionScript 2 on Macromedia Flash MX back in high-school. In spite of all the (deserved) hate Flash gets, we got to give it credit too.

- It was a response to the stagnant IE-dominated web that allowed people to experiment and create incredibly rich content that is still hard to replicate.

- It's editor was amazing for introductory programming. It was as easy and intuitive to use as any vector-graphics editor, but you could get really complex on your programming too. It was very visual, very graphical, which helped.

- It was great for animation. I really can't think of anything that compares. There's lots of animation software out there but most are targeted to video. There's lots of libraries for animating Canvas/SVG, but they don't have interfaces/editors for non-programmers. Flash was an amazing middle-ground; a great creative AND technical tool IMO.

- ActionScript was nice; it wasn't daunting, it had types to help you, but they didn't clutter the syntax. If I recall correctly, the tooling wasn't too shabby either, with good auto-complete and suggestions as you type.

It's thus no wonder it caught on like wildfire and there was so much content for it. It was a good option for technical projects and creative ones, beginners and experts. I definitely don't want to see Flash making a comeback on web, but I wouldn't mind seeing it in standalone applications (assuming security doesn't become an issue), and I could see its value on education, granted, with the right editors and tools.

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