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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Flash player's code super-messy by now? (a hint towards that could be all the vulnerabilities found for it every week). Open sourcing it would have to dramatically improve the code quality and in a relatively short period of time (2 years max), otherwise browser vendors would never go along with it (nor should they).

Sounds like a daunting task, especially if no big organization/leader takes up the task of cleaning it up, the way OpenBSD did with LibreSSL.

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You don't necessarily need to fix all the bugs. It just needs to be sandboxed properly. In the extreme case you could compile it to web assembly and run it inside the browsers existing wasm sandbox.

I think all the comments are missing the point. This is about preserving our digital history. A huge amount of content exists only in flash. It would be sad to see it all disappear. It's even being used in important AI research, with openAI making a ton of old flash games available for training AIs. I have fond memories of many simple flash games I used to play on the school computers. I still have a bunch of .swf files I saved that won't open anymore.

If you like your flash plugins, don't delete them.

How come they won't open?

I have no idea. Whenever I try to open the file, firefox and chrome just download it. It used to work fine.

(Also even back in the day some flash games had built in DRM that required contacting an external server to run. And I have no idea how to fix that.)

Maybe your .swfs need to be embedded in an HTML page to work? If they use external assets referenced by relative URLs the path is relative to the embedding HTML page (this used to cause some confusion).

If you really want to get them working you can try:

- Opening them in the debug player, maybe you'll see a trace that gives you a clue.

- Decompiling (with the right software this is often quite successful... 'Sothink' used to be pretty good) , opening in the Flash authoring environment and re-exporting.

- Trying older versions of Flash Player (Adobe still provides them for download)

> otherwise browser vendors would never go along with it

Huh? Who said anything about browser vendors? This is about preserving history, not preserving features in web browsers. Browser vendors can and should continue to remove support for Flash regardless of whether it's open sourced or not.

Flash doesn't have to be shipped with browsers. You could always install it manually.

It would be good to have it as the reference player, for archivist purposes and to help the already existing open efforts achieve higher compatibility. This doesn't mean it has to ever be run as a browser plugin or outside of a sandbox (such as a VM, an emulator or a bsd jail).

it'd be so embarrassing that it'll never happen

I had access to the FlashLite source code a while back, and it was a total disaster. I can't imagine how bad the mainline code is.

No matter how bad source code is it's will still make it much easier for other implementations to get better compatibility.

Plenty of people in game development used Scaleform and it's have much better compatibility than any open source Flash reimplementation while it's codebase is solid.

How about just open sourcing pepper flash to start with? That has fewer security issues, if I understand it correctly.

It probably still would not be enabled by default.

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