[shadowgovt]

Flash could have survived if Adobe open-sourced the codebase. But they kept it in-house and didn't have enough resources to mutate it in light of rapidly-evolving demands placed on web technologies by mobile architectures. I suspect there'd have been plenty of volunteers stepping up (including, possibly, from Apple itself) if Adobe hadn't decided to dragon-hoard its IP.

But in the web era, IP isn't king; communications is.