back to article Petition calls for Adobe Flash to survive as open source zombie

A group of developers have taken to GitHub with a petition to save Adobe Flash following the Photoshop giant's largely welcomed decision to end support for the oft-reviled software in 2020. The petition to open-source Flash acknowledges Adobe's reasons for killing Flash, namely that it's been superseded and is woefully …

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      1. Pirate Dave Silver badge
        Pirate

        Re: Please, No!

        "And how would I activate Windows XP without the activation servers?"

        By 2117, shouldn't the hardware be able to crack the 2003 activation key encryption in like .25 seconds?

      2. jelabarre59

        Re: Please, No!

        And how would I activate Windows XP without the activation servers? Even with emulation we need to resolve the licensing and activation issues.

        By 2117 ReactOS might be close to full WinXP compatibility.

        1. Pirate Dave Silver badge
          Pirate

          Re: Please, No!

          "By 2117 ReactOS might be close to full WinXP compatibility"

          I wonder if Hurd will be ready by then?

    1. d3vy

      Re: Please, No!

      "How about, as a last resort, playing it through a nice large screen with a decent audio output and recording it onto another device?"

      Well for a start that would turn a dynamic & interactive presentation into a static one... At least I've never seen a video with a working button....

      1. Tim99 Silver badge

        Re: Please, No!

        @dv3y

        I was talking about academics and researchers - They, or their assistants, have plenty of time :-)

        So record all of the possible permutations and combinations separately, and edit them together into a different format of media with the necessary links? It should be possible with HTML5...

        1. BebopWeBop
          Facepalm

          Re: Please, No!

          So record all of the possible permutations and combinations separately, and edit them together into a different format of media with the necessary links? It should be possible with HTML5...

          And while you have solved the combinatorial explosion you will move on to the Halting problem?

        2. Pompous Git Silver badge

          Re: Please, No!

          "So record all of the possible permutations and combinations separately, and edit them together into a different format of media with the necessary links? It should be possible with HTML5..."

          Snarg

        3. d3vy

          Re: Please, No!

          @Tim99

          "So record all of the possible permutations and combinations separately, and edit them together into a different format of media"

          Lets look at an example, a firm favourite from the golden days of flash, the 1990s - Joe Cartoon Frog in a blender.

          Go and google that *Simple* animation with at most 10 interactive buttons and tell me how long you think it would take to convert to something usable that worked in a close enough manner to not lose the meaning of the original.

          Now, thats obviously a daft example, no one is going to waste time converting that, but its a simple application and it would be massively time consuming - imagine the same for a bigger - more useful resource, why bother with that when the people that need it could just use the open source version that is being asked for here...

          Think of the resources serious and otherwise which will be lost if we can no longer run flash.

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Tim99 Silver badge

        Re: Please, No!

        @Symon, have an upvote.

        Prior to 1849, record copies of Acts were handwritten onto animal skin parchment (usually goatskin). From that time onwards printed record copies use high quality vellum (calfskin). Private Acts have been printed on archival papers since 1956. In 2015 The National Archives advised that they do not need a vellum copy of Public Acts and that archival paper was sufficient. Printing on vellum continued for heritage and traditional reasons. In a FOI request the 2008 cost of printed vellum was quoted at £31.08 a page, which seems reasonable.

        In churches, records of important events like births, deaths and marriages were handwritten in archive quality paper books; as are the "original" signed copies of these documents. Normally Wills, etc., are on acid-free paper. Early church codices were written onto papyrus or animal skin. Unbleached cellulose fibre paper goes back at least 2,200 years in China. Good quality paper can still be made from reclaimed hrmp, linen and cotton rags.

      2. MJB7

        Re: Vellum

        If you *really* want durability, there's nothing beats cuneiform on baked clay tablets. Proven lifetime of more than five millenia.

  1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    There already *are* open source alternatives to Flash that can play older games and a VM ( as suggested above) is a viable solution for the remainder. I think this new proposal would simply keep Adobe's implementation, bugs and all, limping on indefinitely. (The sociopaths who currently refuse to remove the Flash crap on their websites would jump at the chance to keep it alive forever.)

    1. tony2heads

      Is that Gnu Gnash that you are referring to

      1. Denarius

        have a horrible feeling

        that a couple of open source media players already play flush files aside from gnash. For those who want to use those files of course. Now if the c****n* who insist on using Flush as part of their government associated sites could just be flushed down sewers also I would be slightly mollified.

  2. TrumpSlurp the Troll
    Trollface

    Open source it!

    This is the perfect opportunity to reimplement it as part of systemd.

    1. GrumpenKraut
      Devil

      Re: Open source it!

      > This is the perfect opportunity to reimplement it as part of systemd.

      Be patient! Kindly wait until sytemd-wwwbrowser has been finished.

      1. Bronek Kozicki

        Re: Open source it!

        You may laugh but considering that Poettering gets his OS user-space design classes from Microsoft, and there is Windows service "WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery", which in fact is HTTP stack built into the OS, it is imaginable he might just do the same. And then invite Gnome developers to make it a dependency.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bad idea

    As others have said, it's a bad idea to revive Flash as an open-source zombie. It would only make the technology live longer than useful.

    And for people worried about history being lost, get a VM to emulate it, already ! The Amiga still lives in emulators after all, there's no reason Flash wouldn't do the same.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Flash (Gordon's) Alive.

  5. Slx

    I think it’s really time it was just let go. The sooner legacy Flash junk gets off the web, the better.

  6. David Austin

    It's Legacy Tech

    If you wanna play with it, fire up a Windows 98 VM without internet access, the same way that someone would want to play with any old versions of stuff in a secure way (Looking your way, RealMedia)

    Nothing stopping you building an oldskool machine with 1995/1998/2001 era technology and software. No need to keep this zombie shuffling on for the rest of us.

    1. find users who cut cat tail

      Re: It's Legacy Tech

      > If you wanna play with it, fire up a Windows 98 VM

      How long before you need an emulator to run the VM that can run Windows 98?

      > Nothing stopping you building an oldskool machine with 1995/1998/2001 era technology and software.

      Yes, nothing, except possibly the enormous effort required.

      1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

        Re: It's Legacy Tech

        "Yes, nothing, except possibly the enormous effort required."

        Well, either you want something, or you don't.

      2. PNGuinn
        Devil

        Re: It's Legacy Tech

        "Yes, nothing, except possibly the enormous effort required."

        Some people feel that really heinous crimes require a really strong deterrent.

      3. d3vy

        Re: It's Legacy Tech

        "Yes, nothing, except possibly the enormous effort required."

        And cost.

        I wanted to play some dos based games a while ago and they just wont work well when emulated.

        So I though, "I know Ill jump on eBay and pick up a 90's era machine for a few ££"

        How wrong I was, back in '98 I built an (at the time) kick ass machine.

        AMD K6 266MHz processor

        32MB Ram

        4.3GB HDD

        15" Monitor

        Voodoo 3 Graphics Card

        It cost me around £450

        To buy a machine on eBay with the same spec now I'd need about the same money again.

        Wish I'd kept it now instead of binning it.

  7. Dieter Haussmann

    I doubt it. It was a honey-trap myriad of backdoors all along.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No problem

    I can't believe this is even being discussed when systemd plans to include a flash player. Sure it will only run as root, but that's good, right?

    (yes, it still hurts.... Thanks for asking)

  9. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Unbelievable!

    Important Content -> Flash

    Does not compute

  10. CFWhitman

    I'm guessing that the end of Flash development will allow at least one of the open source efforts to re-implement a Flash player to catch up to the current state of affairs. That can be the new Flash if there needs to be one (which I suspect there might be to at least some extent).

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And yet I still encounter websites that refuse to display anything unless I install Adobe Flash first!

    1. PNGuinn
      Thumb Up

      "And yet I still encounter websites that refuse to display anything unless I install Adobe Flash first!"

      Obligatory "Move along now - nothing to see here"

      1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

        That's why it's important to remember history so we don't make the same mistakes. After all, only complete morons created entire websites out of flash (rather that using flash to enhance a real website)... we wouldn't want the same class of morons to do the same with new technology would we?

        Oh wait... JavaScript...

        1. Pompous Git Silver badge

          "only complete morons created entire websites out of flash (rather that using flash to enhance a real website)"

          With 'Snarg', Artist Drops Oils for Flash

          Snarg

          Presumably "real" websites are created with oil paint on hand-woven linen canvas from the Himalayas...

          NB. I've linked to Jef's original Snarg from ca. 1997 rather than what it has evolved into and the NYT article now links to.

    2. Tom 64

      >"And yet I still encounter websites that refuse to display anything unless I install Adobe Flash first!"

      Suggest you stay away from those clown porn sites, no good can come of it.

  12. Number6

    Some of the BBC website content is still in Flash. I notice this because I've mostly removed Flash plugins from my systems and so get an error message telling me I need Flash to view the content. I close the browser window at that point.

  13. John H Woods Silver badge

    Much of the Flash ...

    ... that is worth keeping can simply be converted to video. I rather liked the "Decline of Video Gaming" series ...

    1. patrickstar

      Re: Much of the Flash ...

      Vector graphics tend to look crappy if encoded as normal video (those sharp edges aren't really appreciated by most video codecs).

      And Flash is a lot, lot more than just a vector animation toolkit.

  14. zermok

    Amazing how people are control minded

    Just FYI, the standards today are controlled by the same clube of 33 you hate because of corporations blabalbla....

    https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List

    so if you think that to be against a type of technology thinking that you are a freedom rebel so you have been fooled.

    Personally it's much much more fun to program in Actionscript that Javascript, I would say javacrap...

    and take much less time, allowing me enjoy life with my beloved ones.

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