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.
Flash was special. Javascript and HTML5 are just the pits. There’s a reason why facebook disallowed profile customization. Remember those custom mouse cursors on MySpace? That was huge joke…
One simply does not convert Flash to HTML5. 99.9% of the time, it CAN’T be done. Millions of sites are going close down (temporarily or permanently) when flash player goes out.
I have a simple hobby site. Luckily it’s not mission critical. I’ve been trying to convert it over for more than 8 years. I’m convinced it simply can’t be done.
In flash, you could load swfs within swfs. In HTML5, you use iframes.
To communicate between these frames, you use javascript, and it can only be done while the files are hosted. Cross domain talk doesn’t work on your local hard drive (it’s a pain in the butt to have to export/upload over and over just to test things out).
if else code is broken, absolutely broken. in flash, if else prevented you from going onto the next frame unless all conditions were met. javascript doesn’t give a rats @$$ about this and lets you go to the next frame. if conditions aren’t met, the function breaks.
actionscript =/= javascript
they may have similar code, but they don’t behave in the same way, not by a long shot.
it would be interesting to see users file a class action against web browser companies like google, fox, ms etc.. simply because they are being forced out of business or having their IP hindered. doesn’t matter how much time they gave us to convert, again, 99.9% of the time, it CAN’T be converted. where’s the “good’ol EU (lol)” to file its anti-trust suites over this?
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.