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Petition Asks Adobe To Open-Source Flash To Preserve Internet History (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer:
A petition is asking Adobe to release Flash into the hands of the open-source community. Finnish developer Juha Lindstedt started the petition a day after Adobe announced plans to end Flash support by the end of 2020. "Flash is an important piece of Internet history and killing Flash means future generations can't access the past," Lindstedt explains in the petition's opening paragraph. "Games, experiments and websites would be forgotten." The developer wants Adobe to open-source Flash or parts of its technology so the open-source community could take on the job of supporting a minimal version of the Flash plugin or at least create a tool to accurately convert old SWF and FLA files to modern HTML5, canvas data, or WebAssembly code... Lindstedt is asking users to sign the petition by starring the project on GitHub. At the time of writing, the petition has garnered over 3,000 stars.
A reporter at ZDNet counters that "the only way to really secure Flash is to get rid of it... If Flash lives, people will continue to use it, and without security support, it will be even more insecure than ever." He points out there's already several programs that convert Flash into other formats -- and that Adobe already open sourced its Flex framework for building Flash applications back in 2008 (now supported by the Apache Software Foundation as Apache Flex). "In other words, we don't need the Flash source code to convert or create Flash files. Just let Flash go already...!
"Usually, I'm favor with open-sourcing everything and anything. Not this time. Flash has proven to be a net of endless security holes. It's time to let it go for once and for all.
A reporter at ZDNet counters that "the only way to really secure Flash is to get rid of it... If Flash lives, people will continue to use it, and without security support, it will be even more insecure than ever." He points out there's already several programs that convert Flash into other formats -- and that Adobe already open sourced its Flex framework for building Flash applications back in 2008 (now supported by the Apache Software Foundation as Apache Flex). "In other words, we don't need the Flash source code to convert or create Flash files. Just let Flash go already...!
"Usually, I'm favor with open-sourcing everything and anything. Not this time. Flash has proven to be a net of endless security holes. It's time to let it go for once and for all.
History is history. Deleting it to chase some mythical "security" unicorn deletes a part of the internet's history.
(Let's leave aside how top-down the Flash eradication campaign has been. The users still want it, and telling them they can't have it because you want to play with your shiny new HTML5 toys is a non-starter.)
Don't open source it. Don't share or preserve it. Shoot it and bury the remains. It needs to go away. That's the point of EOLing it.
To the guy who countered that flash should just be forgotten rather than open-sourced, his excuse for doing so is stupid.
Yes, Flash in it's current closed-source state is riddled with security holes and vulnerabilities. However if it got open-sourced then one of the first things people would be able to do for the first time ever is pour over the source - find all those security holes - and fucking FIX them.
And so long as that's the only thing people do with flash once it's open sourced (no more feature creep added by Adobe) then it should be just fine.
Wait until it's completely dead, buried, and gone, even from grandma's old Windows XP machine, THEN open-source it for the sake of history, when there's no risk anyone is ever going to start using it again.
Oh, you think Flash is a security problem now? Publish the source code to it. The malware writers will go over that with a fine toothed comb, and the rate of zero-days will go up by a factor of 10 until they finally exhaust it.
That, and everyone and their mom will be forking it to try to patch the holes they find. It'll be complete chaos.
Though... now that I think about it.... that will make flash SOOO much more of a security hazard that even most of the morons that are refusing to migrate their old crap will be forced to action. Maybe that'll be a net good? "Difficult to say... always in motion the future is."
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Someone is going to recreate Flash, Adobe lacks the power to kill it.
Moreover, whatever people use in preference to Flash in the future will be just as riddled with security issues because, news flash (ha ha ha), the security problems aren't because of Flash itself, they are endemic to remotely delivered applications with untrusted servers. Couple that with an almost entirely useless PKI infrastructure, and we're going to be blaming something other than Flash for the same security issues for years to come. Perhaps forever, unless we go to walled gardens such as Apple's IOS infrastructure or Microsoft's putative Windows Store.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
If 5000 so-called artists want to save Flash and 500000 programmers want to kill it, Adobe will have to go with the higher number.
Few things have caused as much damage as old religious texts and their users, but I don't want them destroyed. They should be kept so we can remember history and not be doomed to repeat it.
A majority, no matter how big, should not be allowed to erase part of history, whether it's burning books or wiping code. This is especially true for bad history.