Comment by apignotti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apignotti | Hacker News Reader

A FOSS Flash Player implementation has certainly value, and I hope to have contributed to the cause by starting the Lightspark project years ago. The sad reality is that the Flash runtime is massive and under-documented. The best approach for Flash preservation in the medium term is using _actual emulation_ to run the binary player itself.

Further reading:

https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with...

https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-...

https://medium.com/leaningtech/announcing-cheerpx-for-flash-...

https://medium.com/leaningtech/cheerpx-for-flash-now-general...

For questions: https://twitter.com/alexpignotti

So, to archive/preserve content that was lost because it relied on a proprietary closed-source technology we should be relying on _your_ proprietary closed-source technology?

Please. I understand you're trying to make a living here, but being able to use F/LOSS software is absolutely critical for the preservation movement.

“Not-for-profit, charitable and educational organisations can benefit from discounted rates.”. Yeah, no, thank you.

Hopefully charitable and educational organisations aren't just waiting for someone else to do the work for them for free. If they don't like this approach they can pay people to work on improving open source flash implementations.

I see you over and over again in Flash Player threads. Your approach isn't good because it requires someone else's, namely Adobe's, cooperation, and even then, you still end up with a black box inside another black box. Doesn't feel sustainable.

Why does it require Adobe's cooperation?

Because he said so previously. There's some licensing stuff he's apparently very worried about.

> To use CheerpX for Flash, a licence is required for both CheerpX itself, and for distributing the Adobe Flash Player. This is a requirement for both self-hosted and cloud-hosted installations. In many cases, we will be able to offer both licences under the same commercial agreement. In some cases, a separate licence will need to be procured from Harman. Leaning Technologies can make the right introductions and facilitate the conversation with Harman.

https://medium.com/leaningtech/cheerpx-for-flash-now-general...

It's even worse than I remember. So, a very b2b very proprietary product. I mean, their website even has pictures of random smiling people and a bunch of logos of random companies. Most everything leads to "contact us". Technical details are sparse. Can't get more b2b than this.

Can't see how this can even begin to approach content preservation we're talking about here.

Seems especially silly as there’s a real business use case here, for people who made apps using Flex. Not sure how many companies actually still depend on that but it was definitely a thing for a while there. Surely much better to focus on that.

They could as well make use of that underlying x86 emulation technology to run ActiveX components and sell it to those companies that still rely on them in their internal systems — I'm sure there still are such companies.

Wrapping a piece of proprietary technology with other piece of proprietary technology is not the way to go with this. I get that you keep saying it's easier than creating a new player from scratch, but it doesn't mean it's better.

I just curious couldn't someone just write down missing part of documentstion looking at something like Scaleform source code? So someone else can make clean room implementation using the doc.

Scaleform impplementation of Flash player always looked really decent to me.

You can find some flash player source in Doom3 BFG edition source code! Apparently some people at ID wrote their internal flash player just for the menus!

I don't know how good it is

For anyone who's curious to peep at the code: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3-BFG/tree/master/neo/sw...

But it mostly seems like a simple, reverse-engineered, purpose-built player for their own use, so probably nothing that the open source community will have much use from.

Scaleform was just far more feature-complete and can run apps of almost any complexity. Still not 100% feature complete since you don't need many thing for game UI.

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