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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.
Two reasons:
1.) Opensourcing Flash would probably open Adobe to a lot of possible legal liabilities. It may incorporate technology licensed from 3rd parties, and expurging those from the source takes resources (engineers and lawyers). And even if they did a 100% perfect job removing every single thing non adobe controlled, that does not mean that anyone would disagree with them and take tham to court. That could be a honest disagreement, or some patent troll of sorts seeing what can be extorted...
2.) Adobe already makes programming tools which allows you to take a FLA or SFW file and convert it to todays HTML5/CCS3/ECMAScript standards. And as time passes, those will get better, and rake adobe lots of £€¥$ .
The best bet to preserve the parts of the web heavy on flash, is to develop a prupose built minimal browser, only for those sites, where the 2020 version of the plugin resides "as is" with no other plugins or ad-ons, and which can ONLY browse Whitelisted sites... Even better if you develop an addon for 2020 browsers that says "Open in flash" (analogous to the current "Open in IE"Plugins nowadays) and invoke that minimal browser for that site and that alone...
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!