[kmeisthax]

I'm not sure exactly how to properly cite Apple's side of the story anymore, since it was from a Twitter thread that I don't know how to search for[0]. I know there was something on InternalTechEmails as well but I'm too afraid to touch Elon's Musk anymore.

Apple throwing "port Flash Player and HW accelerate it" to an intern also tracks. Especially if this was early iPhone development where basically half the company was being press-ganged into giving Steve Jobs an iPhone demo that wouldn't crash on stage.

Everything you said about Adobe management also tracks. I'm reminded about Jobs' quote about Xerox being filled with copier-heads[1].

Also...

>second system effect

Are you telling me that there was a Flash Player equivalent of Mac OS Copland[2]'s development at some point?

[0] Said thread also revealed that Jobs felt snubbed from not being able to have Adobe's CEO on speed dial

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7aUJyJbJMw

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)

[cpeterso]

> Are you telling me that there was a Flash Player equivalent of Mac OS Copland[2]'s development at some point?

Yes, though these projects focused on “sidecar” JITs that would live alongside the legacy ActionScript VM inside the same Flash Player, not replacing the sacred Flash renderer.

A successful example was AVM2, the AS3 VM (open sourced in partnership with Mozilla as Tamarin [1]). A few years before that, a team had evaluated whether the .NET JIT (or a cleanroom implementation developed in-house) was technically and legally an option.

Much later, long after I had left, I heard from friends still at Adobe that somehow JVM developers from Oracle had joined the Flash team in the mid-2010s and were eager to attempt yet another VM, based on their JVM experience. But by this time, Adobe no longer wanted to invest in modernizing the Flash platform when it could simply milk the cash cow.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(software)

[cpeterso]

btw, the source code for Flash Player 4 is available on the Internet Archive. That was before my time at Macromedia, but I heard that Macromedia either open sourced the code (and then changed their mind for Flash Player 5 when they started charging for source code access) or it has been shared with a partner company who leaked it. Supposedly a few Korean electronics companies included this Flash Player 4 code in their devices when Macromedia was trying to sell Flash Lite (also a fork of Flash Player 4) as an solution for mobile phone UIs.

I know Adobe will never open source the final Flash Player code (because of third-party code licenses and there’s nothing for Adobe to gain), but I wish they had at least open sourced their internal test suite so open source players could improve their Flash compatibility.