[willio58]

To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do? If Adobe came out and said “flash is dead” too early, it would be the nail in the coffin. By waiting decade(s) past its peak usefulness to kill it, they probably kept more people in flash jobs for longer than they would have otherwise. And if you as a developer couldn’t see flash’s demise on the horizon, isn’t that at least partially on you?

[badsectoracula]

> To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do?

Open source the Flash Player code and work towards properly defining the SWF format. They could have kept their shiny IDE that a ton of people knew how to use and work with but also made it possible for Flash to become part of the open web - since it was actually useful.

This is something that they were repeatedly asked to do, but never ended up doing because Adobe wanted to have full control over it - and ended up having full control of something dead.

[Cyberdog]

> Open source the Flash Player code

This sounds easy, but it isn't. Major commercial closed-source projects often include third-party software which itself isn't under OSS licenses, and publishing the project without violating those licenses means removing them from the code base before open sourcing it (which may result in a completely non-functional project), negotiating with the provider of the third-party software to allow for their code to be open-sourced (probably impossible), or replacing the licensed code with free alternatives (which may not exist, most likely have a different API if they do exist, and would take developer resources to develop from scratch).

All this preparation for OSSing the code base takes work, and where's the bottom line? How would Adobe, a public company with shareholders and all that nonsense, profit from OSSing Flash? It wouldn't make them business sense to do so.

That's not to say this sort of thing never happens (see Netscape and Mozilla), but it's just never as simple as "they should just release the source."

[frognumber]

The major reason I don't use Adobe is lack of trust in Adobe. I want my files to work next year, and in 10 years. That's also why I don't use anything B2B from Google, and avoid Oracle (who doesn't break products the same way as Adobe and Google, but tends to milk cash cows in unpleasant ways).

The payback on open-sourcing something like Flash is maintaining trust. I trust open-source. I trust a few commercial companies who invest like crazy in maintaining trust (e.g. Microsoft or AWS). That leads to business on unrelated product lines down-the-line.

[badsectoracula]

I don't know how easy it'd be, though it would certainly be possible for Adobe. And something not being easy is not really a reason for it to not happen, especially when the alternative is complete death of the product.

But that isn't the point though since the question was what was expected them to do, not how easy that would be.

[None4U]

Amazon managed to do it with CryEngine

[blooalien]

And yet there exist open source Flash renderers [0] to this day which can render much of that old Flash content with little to no issues. Kinda sad that multiple other folks could each independently accomplish what Adobe themselves could not.

[0]: https://alternativeto.net/software/flash-player/?license=ope...

[SV_BubbleTime]

It’s also not like they killed the flash devs when the project ended. I’m pretty sure most of them were fine and able to learn new work somewhere else or in another dept.

Of all the places I expected to see a top comment attacking Adobe for killing flash… yea actually nevermind, it’s backwards enough to make sense here ;)