Covering the space of open source projects and initiatives

Should Adobe Open Source Flash

It’s no secret that Adobe Flash is being killed off.

For a while now Flash has been going down the slow painful road of obsolescence. Since Chrome 55, HTML5 has been the prefered experience for users1, and we’ve seen sites like YouTube rewrite their Flash portions to take advantage of HTML5 standards. While HTML5 standards surge in popularity and we find new ways of taking advantage of JavaScript and CSS, Flash has fallen far behind, among security issues2 and continued criticism for it being a completely closed and proprietary platform.

The final nail in the coffin has come, however. Adobe themselves are completely dropping Flash by the year 2023, finally putting an end to Flash, once and for all. While no doubt older websites will continue to use it, whether it be lack of continued support or just because “it’s easier”, moving forward we will undoubtedly lose large portions of internet, or at the very least the ability to use whatever functionality they provided.

However, there is a new push to encourage Adobe to release the source code behind Flash on GitHub. A petition, in the form of stars, has been created by user pakastin, and at the time of writing is rising rapidly in popularity. The purpose would be to “…keep Flash projects alive safely for archive reasons”, a noble goal indeed. You can check out the repository here, where a star counts as a single vote in the petition. It will be interesting to see how Adobe reacts, and we will reach out to the creator to see if he has any statements.

There is hope Flash could live on, even as a legacy open source repository of code, which could be invaluable to some.