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Comment by tombert

3 hours ago

I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago.

If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020.

If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authoring tech.

3 comments

tombert

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odo1242  1 hour ago

There would still be the security issues, but yea this is still true

  • tombert  1 hour ago

    Sure, maybe, but I think if it were FOSS'd back in ~2005, then these security issues could be addressed by a larger set of eyes, including the browser-makers themselves.

    If this hypothetical universe happened, I think we'd have had something akin to WASM much earlier. Flash already had its own bytecode and VM, and even had something roughly like Emscripten [1] to compile existing C++ code to Flash.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossBridge