[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.