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 :)
I hate Flash and want it to die a horrible, agonizing death.
That's cruel :)
Is there any real meaning to making Flash open-source at this point? (Besides historical purposes, as cited.)
Not sure. Less chance that it can become phoenix rising from the ashes.
Agree with you. I think this sentence, taken from the write up is the clue:
'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'.
It means reinventing Flash. May be the skeleton remains, but the body may be entirely different.
No closed source developer company wants to make its work open source.
kill flash, it should have been done long ago, there are no good reasons to keep it.
This was disappointingly click-baity (unlike itsFOSS) the newsletter subject was "Adobe Flash to go Open Source". People are discussing the possibility, probably have been for a decade.
In the newsletter, yes. I wanted to write the entire sentence but it would have been too big for the email subject. I don't like clickbait myself so this is not something I am proud of :(
All good, there's not many people that would reply so honestly
Personally, I like Flash. It has really been the pioneer in bringing multimedia to the internet and I think that it doesn't quite get the credit it deserves.
I would like to see it open sourced so that it can live on in some other form and not lose all that has been created in the past. Maybe by open sourcing bit of it at a time, the community would be able to stamp out bugs and security issues more rapidly. At least, that is my hope.
I agree with you entirely. Bring on open source flash. The number of people using it is falsely underestimated by all the experts wishing it's demise which has been forecast by them for the passed decade at least. I am sure it will continue and still be used by millions.
Why not, as long as it's open source? Surely a few million people will do a much better job than Adobe. I used to love Dreamweaver and I'm pretty sure that the open source community will quickly clamp down on security holes, at least much faster than glacier speed Adobe :)
LOL
My opinion? Kill it. Kill it with fire.