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nkkollaw

Why not contribute to well-established open source Flash players?

http://lightspark.github.io/

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

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Or https://github.com/mozilla/shumway which doesn't require any native code

Shumway is a dead project (hasn't been updated for a while). Too bad, because it showed promise.

It can be forked and continued.

Last time I tried it was working surprisingly well. Even if it's dead it can be useful.

> Even if it's dead it can be useful.

An appropriate thing to say in a discussion about Flash :)

An open source Flash player is not perfectly bug-for-bug compatible with the real Flash player.

Sure, but if anyone is really interested in Flash and Adobe's player is reaching EOL, whatever open source project gets to be used as its substitute will become the standard, and no one will care about compatibility with Adobe's Flash player, since no one will have it installed.

Which one is everyone going to install: an open source flash player that's not quite compatible, or the adobe one that's perfectly compatible?

The one that isn't abandoned, which in 2020 will be the open source one.

Again, I don't see why if there's interest in Flash and Adobe is abandoning its player, the open source ones can't be made to work as well (or as bad) as Adobe's.

Firefox copied IE's quirks back in the day, I don't see why it can't be done again.

Flash is more complex than HTML/CSS/JS though.

are you sure? i worked with flash and actionscript, and i doubt they are more complex than html/css/js, personaly i think the contrary.

What make more difficult the reimplementation is the abscence of a specification or a standard.

I am talking about the entire history of Flash from 1996 on.

The SWF specification has been open for many years.

This ignores all legacy Flash applications, which were designed for the original player (bugs and all). These are the legacy that need to be preserved. Presumably (though I'd love to see counterexamples) most people using Adobe Animate CC (the latest version and rebrand of Flash) these days are targeting HTML5 anyways.

Ah, I see.

Then I guess the bugs can be taken into account like Firefox did with IE6?

Perhaps having a compatibility-mode on/off so that new movies could follow the standard.

I think movies and animations are not the problem, those would be easy to playback if the codecs are right, there are planty of games, some 3d, and some interactive applications that use Flash and Flex, there are tons of APIs that Flash supports and implementing all of those exactly as in Flash was a huge task for the community, since Flash is not used in new projects just as legacy very few developers are interested in working on that in their free time.

Because they're all alpha-level, and will probably always be to Flash what ReactOS is to Windows.

Perhaps, but let's say Windows is gone tomorrow: wouldn't React OS gain a lot of traction given all the software for Windows, and perhaps get a spike of volunteers?

> let's say Windows is gone tomorrow

one can dream

IF Adobe open source it with a good license would make the live easier to the other projects, you could probably reimplement 80% of Flash without problems just by using the API documentation but the rest of 20% will be harder, having the code would solve this.

> The latest beta release of Gnash has been made at version 0.8.10 in mid Feb, 2012.

All of the above.

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