The End of Flash

6 respostas [Última entrada]
Soon.to.be.Free
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Joined: 07/03/2016

It's only one small leap for computer freedom, but it's a long-awaited one- the end of Adobe Flash: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/07/25/1615220/adobe-announces-that-in-2020-flash-player-will-reach-its-end-of-life-in-light-of-newer-technologies. To quote Adobe (in corporatese):

"Today, most browser vendors are integrating capabilities once provided by plugins directly into browsers and deprecating plugins. Given this progress, and in collaboration with several of our technology partners -- including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla -- Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats."

J.B. Nicholson-Owens
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Joined: 06/09/2014

name at domain wrote:
> It's only one small leap for computer freedom, but it's a long-awaited one-
> the end of Adobe Flash:
> https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/07/25/1615220/adobe-announces-that-in-2020-flash-player-will-reach-its-end-of-life-in-light-of-newer-technologies.

I wouldn't get your hopes up about this.

Years ago Adobe said they had stopped working on their Flash player for
GNU/Linux. Years passed and then recently they issued an update for the
GNU/Linux Flash player.

We don't yet have a cross-platform media player that can do the major
functions the Adobe Flash player could do. Some of the functionality we
still need include:

- handling hoverable/selectable regions in an animation. In Flash one could
make an animation such that the hover/click regions are not defined in some
frames but exist in other frames. HomestarRunner.com, a cartoon animated
entirely in Macromedia/Adobe Flash, used this.

- joystick and alternate device input handling. Some people made videogames
with Flash.

I'm not saying anyone should promote or use Adobe's Flash player at all,
regardless of how capable it was. Adobe's Flash player was non-free, only
really worked on 2 OSes in its heyday, always highly insecure, and an
annoyance for updating.

I'm saying one should acknowledge what functions Flash players had, and
expect to scale back their expectations when porting a Flash site into a
standards-compliant website that depends on HTML5, CSS, WebM, and perhaps
Javascript.

vita_cell
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Joined: 07/19/2015

One question, if it is dead/will die, why they won't to open source it?

ADFENO
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Joined: 12/31/2012

Well, because there's no escrow regulated by law that would force them
to do so. Essentially, this means that they are not legally obligated to
do anything such as that. Besides, they could "open source" only half of
it, and no one would ever know unless it's too late (and that they
officially abandon it and no longer respond to questions regarding it).

This is also one of the various criticisms, and suggestions, made
against the Swedish Pirate Party (Swedish: /Piratpartiet/) platform, see
[[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html]]. However, I don't
know if the Swedish Pirate Party is aware of this criticism, or even of
other Pirate Parties are aware of this article, but I hope they do
eventually not only read the article, but also accept/incorporate the
suggestions, for the own good of free/libre software movement, if these
Pirate Parties' platforms ever come true.

--
- [[https://libreplanet.org/wiki/User:Adfeno]]
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/software/ livre. Favor entrar em contato em caso de dúvida.

loldier
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Joined: 02/17/2016

They already have a petition on GitHub to do just that.

It would be great to keep the past accessible but otherwise I don't support keeping it "alive."

https://github.com/pakastin/open-source-flash

However Flash is an important piece of Internet history and killing Flash means future generations can't access the past. Games, experiments and websites would be forgotten.

Mangy Dog

I am a member!

I am a translator!

Desconectado
Joined: 03/15/2015

In short they want us to carry the coffin !

dust to dust for old crooked spyware..ha!

"Champagne please"

jxself
Desconectado
Joined: 09/13/2010

"However Flash is an important piece of Internet history and killing Flash means future generations can't access the past. Games, experiments and websites would be forgotten."

This is the problem that future generations face when past generations decide to use proprietary software. That statement seems like they're starting to realize it, but only just. Need more effort to push them over the edge and come to a complete realization of the full nature of the problem.