Last week we heard the good news that Adobe is officially killing Flash in 2020.
This news was well received by developers and end users alike. Well, at least most people liked the demise of Adobe Flash. But it seems that Adobe Flash has still some fans left.
A group of developers at GitHub have come up with a petition to “save Adobe Flash”. Just a few days after the announcement by Adobe, Juha Linstedt, a web developer with username “Pakastin” on GitHub started a petition calling on Adobe to allow for open source Flash, which he thinks is part of Internet history. According to Linstedt:
“Flash along with its sister project Shockwave is an important piece of Internet history and killing Flash and Shockwave means future generations can’t access the past.”
He went further by saying keeping Flash will mean Flash projects will remain alive and safe. “Games, experiments and websites would be forgotten,” he said in his petition.
The web developer wants Adobe to share parts of its technology as open source so that the community can work on supporting a minimal version of the Flash plugin. Also, keeping Flash alive could also be “for archive reasons” for one never knows what might come up when it goes open source.
He also proposed the possibility of developing a standalone player or even a separate browser for it. He also came up with the possibility of converting SWF/FLA/DIR/DRC into HTML5, canvas, WebGL or WebAssembly.
He acknowledged in his post that Adobe might not want to do so because of licensed components that they will not want to release to the public. He proposed for Adobe to leave them out since it could be replaced or bypassed by open source alternatives.
In his post, “Pakastin” asked users to “star this repository to sign the petition”. At the time of writing, 5,032 had signed the petition.
If you want to save Adobe Flash as an Open Source project, you can use your GitHub account and star this repo:
As for Abhishek, his position is very loud and clear. He wrote “Rest in hell, Flash. You won’t be missed. Not by me, at least”.
What about you? What is your take on this petition to turn Adobe Flash into an Open Source project? Share your views with us on the comment section.
The main & only reason to keep Flash alive today is for 32 bit browser support, which will be the platform killer itself, as more & more browsers aren’t updating their 32 bit editions. While the latest Flash Player may help to keep these more secure (assuming one’s using Flash content), the only good use left for it is legacy gaming (offline) & any other offline apps that requires Flash.
I have doubts that Adobe will freely give Flash away, us longtime 64 bit Linux users must not forget that Adobe once gave us support for 2-3 years, then yanked the rug from under our feet for years. Screw Adobe & the ground they walk on, just as they did us years back.
When I first started programming, I learned flash from a book at the library. I still have all my old websites, games and tools made with flash. It would be a shame if I couldn’t run them anymore.
The demand he has been raising has been solved long back.
It seems he has not heard about flash api floss implementation called OPENFL (which is fully open source)
and language it uses is haxe (Which is similar to AS3)
http://community.openfl.org/t/porting-complete-as3-project-with-flas-to-openfl-how-openfl-supports-flash-assets-fla-swc/8511
http://www.fortressofdoors.com/flash-is-dead-long-live-openfl/
http://community.openfl.org/t/flash-as3-to-haxe-openfl/7938
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36894050/how-to-convert-a-simple-flash-project-to-html5-using-openfl
In jest, ‘Pakastin’, interchange ‘a’ and ‘i’
It is actually Pakastin. I had to double check if it was not Pakistan :)