[turnspike]

I still haven't forgiven Madobe for killing Macromedia Director - a thousand hours of my work lost. It taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of Open Source - protect your investment from the caprice of a single corp.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> caprice of a single corp.

There was no sudden-change: they kept on maintaining Director, years after its main use-cases (kiosk applications, magazine cover demo disc launchers and CD autoplay software) stopped being relevant.

If my experiences at other software companies are anything to go by: Adobe's staffers probably wanted to open-source it but were held back by licensed third-party components.

I haven't seen any true Director Shockwave content on the web since the original Shockwave.com - it was a handful of games that today could be built in JavaScript without any trouble.

[turnspike]

> There was no sudden-change

Yep, it was death by neglect rather than violence. Shockwave was much more powerful than Flash for gamedev, it had true 3D baked in and fantastic audio and video support - in 2001. IIRC lack of a timely OSX version killed it.

Arguably it was the same neglect of the Flash plugin on Mac that partly caused Apple to deep-six iOS support, decimating Flash's marketshare.

[cpeterso]

Adobe knows how to milk cash cow products. They only just stopped selling Director in February 2017.

[Keyframe]

Director (when we all had a stint with INTERACTIVE CD-ROMs in the 90's) and FreeHand taught me that lesson. M'Adobe, tips hat - in both cases.

[rlanday]

Open source projects are guaranteed to be maintained forever?

[hn_throwaway_99]

While of course open source projects can be abandoned, too, in my experience I've seen it much more likely that products, even good, profitable products, are often quickly abandoned if the company deems them no longer "strategic".

[nerdponx]

They're easier to fork.

[Groxx]

Also you can pay someone entirely unrelated to fix things, if the need arises.

Try doing that with closed-source software.

[shitgoose]

and abandon.

[PhasmaFelis]

And fork again.