On 2021-01-02 at 09:23, Curt wrote: > On 2021-01-02, <to...@tuxteam.de> <to...@tuxteam.de> wrote: > >> This is awesome. I never used anything flash myself, but it's >> always great to see someone caring. > > Adobe Flash officially died at the tail-end of 2020, so I wonder what > need exists to prolong it's life in open source.
There is, or should be, no need to prolong the life of the Flash Player browser plugin. Outside of specialty cases mostly involving enterprise environments, at-least-nearly everything that still needs it can and should be updated to use something else. There may, however, be a case for prolonging the ability to play back things stored in a Flash format, *outside* of a browser. That context would eliminate a lot of the security concerns involved in the browser plugin, and would make it a whole lot more possible to preserve the content of existing Flash media for posterity, whether by making it possible to play in its existing form or by making translating it into another form easier. The SWF format is like any other dead / outdated file format. We may not want to generate it anymore, and there may be good reason for no longer using it in production - but there's nothing wrong with perpetuating the ability to read and work with it, and there may be advantages to doing so in certain contexts. (For a comparison in another context, I don't know of anyone who generates MOV or RM files anymore; Apple's QuickTime Player has been dead for a long time, and RealPlayer is sufficiently niche to be actively worth ignoring IMO. But MPlayer et al. still play files in those formats just fine.) -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
