I would like to point out of how google & co. force people to use their technology "standard", like chrome, webrtc and so on. The whole developer community just don't realize how google controls the internet standards and how they proceed to force developers and users to use what they wish.

Statistics are one of the first propaganda tool, fake or real, no one can check if what it shows on your screen is indeed true or false. But as evil is in the details, you will clearly see (if you make a little research by yourself) that what it's published is often not really true, but just a manner to project their wish to people mind.

Example, the repository open-source-flash of pakastin got more than 6777 stars and 132 watches in less than 2 months, webrtc (https://github.com/webrtc/webrtc-org) has painfully 41 watchers and 60 stars since years.

This show clearly that the protagonists are desperately trying to bring the whole worldwide web developer community to their side, and for sure it's easily understandable since a "standard", whatever it is, has no power but with a good amount of developers.

In conclusion, the best way to try to understand what's happening with all these technologies, standards and languages on the web we constantly need to ask questions and proof about all articles published, starting from its source.

Hi,

please change this: FLEX - the main display list / layout engine made by Adobe configured with MXML, was open sourced by Adobe. Now it is being developed by the guys at NextGen ActionScript

to:

FLEX - the main display list / layout engine made by Adobe configured with MXML, was open sourced by Adobe. Now it is being developed by the guys at Apache Flex http://flex.apache.org/index.html

https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/AIR-4178275

Someone write a swf converter and js player.

you can check examples here：http://www.flashreturn.com/default/demo

or covert your swf files here : http://www.flashreturn.com/default/onlineConvert

not perfect, but better than Shumway I think

I love Flash, AS and Shockwave (just as many of the signers here), and I really want it to get open-sourced. I really do understand that there is people who doesn't want it to be alive in our web browsers (mainly due to security flaws), and it's alright if you even post an issue about it. But please, PLEASE don't insult anyone because of it. Same for Flash defenders. Respect, to be respected.

This is something that has been bothering me since I started watching this git, since I do receive emails and notifications about it. I'm talking about discussions and conversations where the only thing that's present is insulting, fighting and calling out the code of conduct every three replies. This is a problem. There is one user (whose name won't be mentioned, but anyone who has been active here knows who he is and he's probably going to reply this anyways) that has been defending AS and Flash. That's fine. But calling those against the cause "trolls", "zombies full with stupidity" and "control minded people" is going a little too far. I get that you had really bad experience with JavaScript, but there is people who loves it (I like it just as much as I like Flash and AS), and you can't attack them for that. Not liking Flash is not a form of trolling, nor is opposing this git.

The only reason for this issue to be written is because of how I really, really want to be part of the discussion, but I'm afraid it's gonna end in a stupidly useless fight like other issues did (and still do). I constantly receive emails about people fighting against other people in this git just to defend (or attack) Flash, which is a shame, because this petition is something I want to calmly talk about, without getting insulted because of me thinking that Flash getting featured in web browsers is bad (ahem).

Please, people, don't insult just to defend your stand. We all have different perspectives, let's just share them without being called a "control minded stupid zombie". I am really tired of how the issues are managing the opinions, and I've seen some really interesting points of view that got trashed away because of the opposing insults.

Respect others' points of view, just as much as you defend yours. And please read the code of conduct to see more about how to face other opinions.

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The cite from the developers site about the project:

Our most famous project for the singer Labuat was a creative idea by spanish agency Herraiz & Soto. The project tried to replicate the experience of painitng with ink in the air following the rhythm of a song. Those manning the mouse can drive the graphics, swirling at will. Try it out and then hit Replay for a mesmerizing Web experience, or hit Record and send your motion painting to a friend.

The song was the first single of the new record by Labuat. The experience proved to be as delicate and beautiful as the melody, and won several prizes around the world, including a Lion at Cannes, FWA of the year by popular election and many national prizes. It was also included by the influential Time magazine in their list of best websites of 2010.

There was a projection of the site mapped into a building where users could control it with a Wii controller.

This one absolutely must be in the art projects list, but its original site http://soytuaire.labuat.com/ is gone :-(.

If the goal is simply to preserve access to history, wouldn't the simple solution be to create a virtual machine image with Flash installed? Existing binaries will not go anywhere, and it's not like there will be new content for some incompatible future version, because no such versions will be made.

ES7 just is a Jake if you compare to Actionscript.

package writing {
    import fire.ICombustionSource;

    public class Charcoal implements IWritingInstrument, ICombustionSource {
        public function Charcoal(){}
        public function line():void {
            trace("Charcoal drew a thick line");            
        }
        
        public function circle():void {
            trace("Charcoal drew an approximate circle");
        }    

        public function burn():void {
            trace("Charcoal now burning");
        }
    }
}

function useWritingInstrument( instrument:IWritingInstrument ):void {
    instrument.line();
    instrument.circle();
}

function burnIt( source:ICombustionSource ):void {
    source.burn();
}
var pen:Pen = new Pen();
useWritingInstrument( pen );

var charcoal:Charcoal = new Charcoal();
useWritingInstrument( charcoal );
burnIt( charcoal );

look like Typescript ? It is Actionscript.

4PDA community supports the petition!
http://4pda.ru/2017/07/27/345658/

It's a far fetched idea - but if Adobe is listening - consider that
Adobe Flash IDE (renamed to something else that's no longer relevant)
could be resurrected to use Swift / Kotlin and piggy back off UIKit or Android native code.

Steve Jobs killed flash - but Apple open source swift.
so consider one way for Flash to be reborn - is to yield to swift / but make it build to android.

craiggrummitt/ActionSwift3#2

Many developers and projects developed amazing flash applications for companies, or for their own interest during the last 20 years. Until today they are still running, using better system/cpu resources than any kind of javascript since flash player (version 26 today) learned and fixed a lot of issues during this time.

Some projects developers and I asked months and even years to get a very stable version, which includes sometimes millions line of code. As you can see, for various valid and logical reason, these projects won't be developed again and again for the only reason that the development "zeitgeist" is changing every 10 years.
It's totally absurd and even dangerous for the freedom of Internet.

I recall to develop a Perl application 18 years ago to automate invoices of a payment system for a company, during this time I had to change a very few function names and logic, but today it's still working flawlessly.
The web SHOULD be like that, don't waste developers to reprogram everything decade after decade, it does not make sense at all, especially when the major tech used is not better and even worse than the previous.
To go forward and avoid to reinvent the wheel again and again, The role of a web browser is to be compatible with an absolute anachronism, thus to prevent any bad guys to control the web technology.

I hope people, trolls and other who definitely not understood why we need flash as open source will now get a better clue of why we absolutely need it done. We have 3 years before the end of the game.

Good luck everybody

It has a bad reputation for Free Software if Adobe Flash is in the list!

https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/FP-4198746

Maybe the near future of internet can be a docker container browser like,
allowing any kind of application, language or else to run natively on your computer without
to take care of compatibility, restrictions, standards and so on.
if anyone has more informations about it please post here thanks.
an intersting approach
https://hub.docker.com/r/toschneck/nativefier/
https://github.com/docker

Stumbled upon this petition because The Next Web wrote an article about it:
https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/07/28/instead-of-killing-flash-we-should-save-it-for-posterity/

One piece of Flash-software I would like to be preserved is Flashmixer. It's the first vj-software I've used. I guess the project startet around 2000 and it was a really cool and advanced app back then.

For some reason the website is still alive: http://www.flashmixer.de
Here's a screenshot: http://www.audiovisualizers.com/toolshak/vjprgpix/flashmixer/flashmixer.htm

In addition here's an old article (2002) from the German De:Bug magazine when Flash was really popular among vjs: http://de-bug.de/mag/vj-flashmixer/

Haxe has resources for Swf, and compiles to ABC and swf
For general reading and writing format library has some powers not so much over graphics.
https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/format/tree/master/format/swf
OpenFL can read and play swf's but not old ones.
https://lib.haxe.org/p/swf
NME similar ( same? )
https://github.com/nmehost/gm2d/tree/master/gm2d/swf
HxSwfml there are some github sources but it's not clear which is best but original here:
https://code.google.com/archive/p/hxswfml/
Theoretically OpenFL/NME could be used as a base for a new SWF player.

i foind an tool that is able to convert compiled flash files (swf) back to project files (fla)
AFAIK adobe animate can open .fla files and export it as HTML5.
this may be usefull in preserving content.
i think you should quote it here:
" Current state of Flash preservation"
but i'm not sure about the legal constraints of tools like that.

another sugestion:
maybe we should create an script (eg: grease monkey script or browser add'on) that look for the checksum of an swf and search for its html5 conversion (if someone already uploaded it somewhere) to provide it where the original content would be present, or ask the user to use the afore mentioned tool to revert it to fla file, then use an tool like adobe animate to export to html5 (i couldnt find open source adobe animate alternatives, compatible with its file format) and upload to an database where it will be tracked back the next time someone open this file.

Whether Adobe opens up the Flash player or not, I think it would be a good first step if this project were to first produce tools to dump and analyze the SWF file format.

Being able to look at the SWF tags and their contents would help in reproducing a working Flash player.

I have some basic experimental code on my systems that I wrote awhile back that basically parse a SWF and dump the tags, that I could post on my Github account for reference if it helps this project.

Adobe: there are millions of good old Flash animation files around that could be historically preserved if the flash player were open sourced, especially on sites like Newgrounds.com.

For security purposes, the open sourced Flash player could be built to play ONLY locally unless explicitly given permission by the user to access network resources.

If the JIT (as I understand how ActionScript 3 is executed) cannot be open-sourced, I would be perfectly fine with that so long as the VM can execute ActionScript 3 regardless in an interpreter.

If there is browser-or OS-specific code that cannot be provided, that is OK as well, so long as open source developers can wrap the code into something that talks to the screen in Linux or otherwise. I would love to give it a fresh and portable start with the SDL library, for example.

If the current Flash player cannot be open sourced, then would it at least be possible to open source an older build, say, Flash 7 or 8, and work forward from there while a subset of the open source community works with you guys to stub out or eliminates vulnerabilities in the latest code? I understand that time is money and I hope this can be arranged with minimal load on Adobe's developers.

If any audio or video codecs cannot be open sourced, would you guys (Adobe or otherwise) be OK with leaving stubs in the code which open source developers can then fill with calls to, say, FFMPEG, to carry out decoding?

It's time to hijack those bastards, license or not, they will go to hell to cut the grass under years of hard development. They don't want people to use internet with advanced technologies, they want the corporations only profit from their own html5 javascript crap standards.
We, people, are going to show how ridiculous they are to try (another time) to control us.
let's decompile AS2 and AS3, and let's do better than Html5 and javascript, even compatible with old browsers which is still widely used for long time around the world.

Just thought I'd share this new effort revealed in 2018 by a small team to create a plugin-free, WebAssembly-powered Flash Player!

Repo: https://github.com/JasonHuang3D/AJC-Flash-WebAssembly-Examples
Thread to Adobe: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2432179

This looks very promising as it has some working demos, and the developers seem determined to complete the project (though could use some assistance). Most notably the project makes use of the FalconJX compiler to preserve 1:1 AS3 support, and they are currently building out their own WASM runtime for interpreting an AJC-based project. It may even be possible to address their needs on the Flash API runtime via some of OpenFLs efforts.

I think we should add this to the Readme, and start to open up a discussion. Let's spread the word!

Pls. http://zombo.com/

We must find a way to preserve this masterpiece of technological innovation. Never forget. Anything is possible at zombocom.

I contributed to a few sourceforge Flash opensource projects in 2000... I believe the spec is already open source. I appreciate the community activism in remembering Flash, but also, Adobe (Macromedia) has already done so?

Hi all!

I got an answer from Adobe Customer Care to post the question to the Adobe Community.
https://twitter.com/AdobeCare/status/927075363431297025

Here goes:
https://forums.adobe.com/message/9947769#9947769

🤞

I'm all for open sourcing flash as I don't think we should leave the existing thousands of flash games to rot (although they might work well enough under gnash), and I starred this repo.

However, I highly doubt Adobe will open source flash in its current state. Reasons:

• Adobe Flash is being migrated/integrated into a new product called Animate, which will retain the same .fla format

• Their flash player likely has tons of internal IP and uses proprietary libraries developed by other companies which were always intended to remain closed source

• At big companies, open sourcing big existing codebases isn't a simple matter of making a github repo and throwing code over the fence.

It would require lots of legal review and work to remove parts of the code which can't be open sourced due to agreement reasons.

This kind of corporate red tape would take months, and would adobe really want to put forth the engineering time and legal resources?

Typically when companies want to get involved in open source, they'll start an internal product with the initial intention of releasing it open source eventually and strategically use libraries which permit that. This isn't the case with this ~20 year old (think macromedia flash in the 90s and where it came from) codebase.

It would probably be better for the open source communities to focus on gnash (and other open source reverse engineered copies of flash player) development.

I don't know if this can be possible but another idea.
as an extension would maybe be a first step....

https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/release-note/fp_27_air_27_release_notes.html

I feel so disappoint.

A lot of intelligent devices use the TCP/UDP port.

Solution

• the intelligent device supports Web socket
• next generation interface or protocol in Web ? HTTP 2 ? MQTT ? WebRTC ?
• next generation network technology ? Wi-Fi 2 ? Li-Fi ? Lightbridge ?
• web extension
• the next generation intelligent device makes lots of money and kills the Web browser by providing new communication way.

Could someone give me more informations ?

I think the standalone player/debugger should definitely be in the scope of open-sourcing.

I understand and agree that keeping the web plugin alive is not the best of ideas.

We're already here. This might be the best place for collective tl;dr of what exists, how behaviors differ, support matrix etc.

e.g.

• Gnash
• Lightspark
• Shumway

Also add Adobe AIR. one of the iconic runtimes.
heavily used by:

• https://gamua.com/starling/
• https://feathersui.com/

Adobe also released the source for flask and together with the AIR
runtime, the developers would be able to still publish updated SDKs

46b9d58 adds links to current open-source projects (yeey 🎉) but also says the reason they are incomplete is because of Flash being closed source. This was then rewritten to “Flash spec” in 66ed6c6.

1. What makes the specification “closed source”? The specification is available. Or are there parts missing from the public specification?

2. Why are those projects incompletion linked to the closed source status of Flash? Are there any sources for e.g. issues on those projects that are blocked by Adobe Flash?

• Why don't you provide any software helping your customers to convert it with
  all full function compatible?
• If not, who will pay all the companies, self employed and hobbyist who are dependent of flash player to reprogram everything (for the same result at the end) ?

thanks for your answer Mr Adobe

So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.

-- Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972, p. 90)

check this
https://meltdownattack.com/
it will definitely help you to doubt about all the fairy tale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0nuQ5o2DYU

Put somewhere a clear statement explaining that "those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it".

In this case it's an obvious reference to why Flash has been rejected at some point and now it's being killed officially.

Why, after a very long and successful history, this piece of tech has been rejected and then killed?

Is it related to business strategy only (i.e. Apple vs the world) or are there tech reasons?

All this should be explored in deep and it will be quite difficult to do if there will be no access to the actual tech.

• Who should we send the letter to? CEO, CTO, ..?
• How sould we send the letter? Via email, post it oldskool, make a video, via social media..?

With the full spec it should be possible to write something to compile games from flash/swf to webassembly.
Or write something in webassembly that can run it (maybe with another intermediary format)

As an Alternative Shumway could be completed so it runs with all content and not only if you're lucky.

What are your suggestions? I'm not familiar with flash so it's likely that there better ways to achieve this :)

In 2006, at the same time Adobe released Flash Player v9.0 and Adobe AIR v1.0, they open sourced the ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) and donated the project to the Mozilla Foundation.

see

• Wikipedia - Tamarin (software)
• Brendan Eich - Project Tamarin
• Frank Hecker - Adobe, Mozilla, and Tamarin

This project Tamarin was hosted on mercurial under 2 main branches

• tamarin-central (not working)
• tamarin-redux (working)
• Tamarin Bugzilla
• Tamarin-devel Archives

Later, after the project was not publicly updated anymore, Adobe moved the sources to a repository named avmplus on github

• adobe-flash/avmplus
• adobe/avmplus (latest)

If Adobe wanted to open source the Flash Player, that AVM2 would be the first thing that would need to be open sourced, and so they already did.

If you look at the repositories, the bugzilla, etc. Adobe was very serious about it, they did not drop the sources and let other people deal with it, they assigned many developers and fully embraced the open source development cycle.

Out of this project only a little part (the NanoJIT got reused by Mozilla in Firefox), but mostly nobody else contributed any code ... for years.

In short, nobody really showed any interest.

As a very tiny open source dev I took on the Tamarin sources and around 2008
published another OSS project: Redtamarin

The goal was simple, reuse the goodness of AVM2 but develop the API side and if possible provide an open source implementation of the Flash API (as much as it makes sense for the CLI).

For close to 10 years, I had exactly zero contributors, especially around 2010 after a special letter of a special someone "WHAT? AS3 on the server-side? you crazy!!!"

Let's be clear I'm not complaining, I'm perfectly happy with my own little OSS project, it does scratch my own hitch, it even lead to interesting side project tools like as3shebang (yep running AS3 as shell scripts, I do admin a dozen Linux server with that).

But I still have a point, what make people think that getting the sources of the Flash Player will magically solve the problem ?

First, the project due to its cross-platform nature is kind of complex, go ahead get the avmplus sources and compile it, then compile it for the different CPU architectures, for different operating systems, it's a whole production.

Second, now imagine that the Flash Player sources are similar to the avmplus sources but probably twice as big and twice as complex, if not bigger than that. Unless you have a team working on it full time, it's unlikely you can publish anything from it.

Third, even if you have the sources, the contributors working on it, all the browser vendors plan to remove completely the support for plugins (they already killed NPAPI), how do you get users to install a plugin that cannot be installed anymore ?

imho you are trying to solve the wrong problem

The problem is not the Flash Player not being open sourced
The problem is the browsers not supporting the installation of plugin

A fork of Chromium/WebKit/Firefox to keep the support for plugin, even with a closed source Flash Player would have more chance to succeed.

https://github.com/Brian151/OpenShockwave/
(name soon to change)
goals:
decompilation of all shockwave media types, including W3D models
editing of shockwave movies and casts

https://github.com/Brian151/Various-Projects/tree/master/Flash/fla_buster
goals:
document XFL format
convert XFL to other formats
possibly bust 'binary blob' FLA
convert to HTML5 in a 'better' way
(currently un-named as it's currently a personal project with only me contributing)

Shockwave was used heavily in the 90s and up till the mid 00s for games and any interactive content especially on the web. It was used alongside flash for many years and was mentioned in the blog update killing flash. If flash gets open sourced then shockwave should be open source as well.

While I understand and agree with this project's perspective of keeping Flash/Shockwave alive by preserving it in the open, for historical/archival purposes, I believe there could also be some compelling technical reasons for wanting this technology. Admittedly, I've only been investigating this fairly recently, but in my efforts, this article cropped up:

http://www.masonchang.com/blog/2010/11/10/tamarin-on-llvm.html

In here, the author performs a series of benchmarks comparing an LLVM backend of an existing open-source Flash implementation, Tamarin, to the NanoJIT implementation of the Actionscript ByteCode (ABC) backend. The results are quite interesting, with many cases of the NanoJIT actually managing to pull ahead in some regards!

The Flash technologies were engineered from the ground-up to provide a small-footprint, fast-interpreted multimedia technology for the web. These goals are clearly aligned with those of the WebAssembly project in attempting to foster a universal bytecode. I believe a proper comparison of WASM and ABC is in order, as perhaps there are some areas where Adobe has gathered implementation knowledge in overcoming certain obstacles that the WebAssembly team has not yet considered.

This, to me, forms one of the most compelling reasons to open Flash as much as possible - specifically any patents still pertaining to technologies such as the NanoJIT. If ABC could stand as the complete bytecode implementation to be integrated in the same space as WASM, with some technology such as Mozilla's Shumway making a comeback to convert the remaining elements in an SWF file to HTML5/CSS3 objects, plugin-less full-browser integration of Flash could become a real possibility. Archival teams would then merely have to work to convert older-format files to the latest versions, so the attack surface, and undefined behavior for such an implementation would not be anywhere near as great as current implementations of the Player.

What are your guys' thoughts? I'm honestly really excited to dive in and take a look at all of this!

First I want to thank everyone involved in this petition. People have mixed feelings about Flash and I fully understand that. I just hope everyone gets the point that we don't want to preserve Flash player as is.

To the point: I'm about to write the letter to Adobe. Do you have ideas about it? I'd like to keep it short and formal. I will also need some help proofreading it, because I'm not professional English speaker.

Thanks! ♥️

As I know PPAPI is linked to WebRTC via its own API bridg,
maybe that would be the best way to look at it, be inspired and do our own bridge

What about waiting with open sourcing flash until 2030?

Let me give a short explanation on why:

• I understand that flash has been used by creative people all over the world to create many beautiful (and many many more less beautiful :p) works. It would be a shame if those works became inaccessible for future generations.
• The same time, the widespread habit of forcing web surfers to install flash needs to die. Websites should be forced to get their stuff together and switch to HTML5. I won't expand further on why HTML5 should be chosen instead, you all know the points.
• Many website owners still deem it acceptable to require users to install flash, and by these websites stating that requirement, many users feel that they can't enjoy the web fully without flash player installed. Websites like scratch.mit.edu or crunchyroll or the HBO web player, similar for many local websites. As a German for example, the livestream of the news website tagesschau.de is still inaccessible for me without flash, even today. Similarly, the mindset "Flash is important in order to surf the web" is still in many people's heads. This makes them ask browser vendors for flash support, or just simply not use the browsers that have no flash support. This basically forms a vicious circle of users ready to install flash, and websites deeming it okay to require it.
• The vicious circle won't break from itself, or at least not fast enough. Sure, with time less and less websites will use and build on flash, but even today there are people who are convinced that everything is broken except flash, who put flash into new products and shrug off all of the issues flash has.

As a compromise to fix both cases, Adobe should wait with open sourcing flash until 2030. In that period, the number of users who have flash or are ready to install a browser with flash support if they reach a website with only flash support will hopefully reach the single percent range or even go below one percent. Currently, Flash is installed on about 70% of Firefox installs, many other browsers ship it by default, so its close to 100% for them. This will force website owners to come up with an alternative. As an example, it will force the scratch team to get their html5 player to a productive state, and will give very strong motivation for crunchyroll to push for its contracts to allow a HTML5 version of their website.

Why 2030? Popular (and flash was popular) technologies have a long tail, even when the company that invented it abandons them. Windows XP still has a market share of about 7%, 3 years after its official deprecation, and I think we'll need to wait a long time as well to get rid of all flash content on the web. Its also likely already that for years following the 2020 abandon, many people will keep an outdated browser around which still supports flash, and its likely that flash will remain downloadable from shady websites.

Also, the future is patient :) nobody cares in 2050 if there was a 10 year period where flash was usable only if you have broken the law or have kept some archived install around, but they will curse us if flash still remains required for some websites :).

The current letter begins with: "We love Flash".

I don't love flash. I don't hate it either. I am signing this petition because I don't want a substantial part of internet history to be lost because of dead proprietary technology.

Please change the wording of the letter to be more neutral. As it is now I have trouble putting my name on a letter which implies that I love flash.