Comment by alhazrod

10 hours ago

I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...

11 comments

alhazrod

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fenomas  6 hours ago

If it was possible they would have loved to - certainly by 2012 or so, and more likely by 2008-9. The reason I heard they couldn't is that by that time Flash Player was a massive 10+ year old codebase with lots of parts that were licensed or external, and nobody had ever tracked which parts would be to be relicensed or rewritten.

Source: I worked there at the time and knew the relevant PMs.

  • tombert  3 hours ago

    That doesn't surprise me, honestly.

    I wish they had been able to figure out how to do it, but licensing and patents and whatnot have held back lots of innovation.

cube00  8 hours ago

They couldn't because it lives on in Adobe Animate which Disney as a customer among others.

  • egypturnash  8 hours ago

    Which they have recently said they will be dropping all support for: https://community.adobe.com/announcements-539/adobe-animate-...

    A lot of people - including studios who use it for projects that can take years to complete - were very unhappy at the prospect of having the only tool that can read their mountains of FLA files (the file format the Flash/Animate editor uses, and used to compile into a SWF) stop working because Adobe turned off the auth servers. Adobe has pulled back to "okay we're, uh, putting it in maintenance mode, expect no new features, ever, just security patches".

    • lelandfe  6 hours ago

      If you follow their mea culpa link, it says they're keeping (a type of) support.

      > Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers...

      > Maintenance mode means we will continue to support the application and provide ongoing security and bug fixes, but we are no longer adding new features.

      Of course, in my experience, such a lifeline never lasts much longer than the furor that earned it...

      1 reply →

    • PaulDavisThe1st  7 hours ago

      A lot of people made the choice to use proprietary tools for their creative work flow, rather than making do with and pushing for better open source equivalents.

      I have some sympathy for them - I am sure they felt it was the only real choice at the time - but not a whole lot.

      2 replies →