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Re: Open Source Flash Alternatives



On 2021-01-02 at 09:23, Curt wrote:

> On 2021-01-02, <tomas@tuxteam.de> <tomas@tuxteam.de> wrote:
> 
>> This is awesome. I never used anything flash myself, but it's
>> always great to see someone caring.
> 
> Adobe Flash officially died at the tail-end of 2020, so I wonder what
> need exists to prolong it's life in open source.

There is, or should be, no need to prolong the life of the Flash Player
browser plugin. Outside of specialty cases mostly involving enterprise
environments, at-least-nearly everything that still needs it can and
should be updated to use something else.

There may, however, be a case for prolonging the ability to play back
things stored in a Flash format, *outside* of a browser. That context
would eliminate a lot of the security concerns involved in the browser
plugin, and would make it a whole lot more possible to preserve the
content of existing Flash media for posterity, whether by making it
possible to play in its existing form or by making translating it into
another form easier.

The SWF format is like any other dead / outdated file format. We may not
want to generate it anymore, and there may be good reason for no longer
using it in production - but there's nothing wrong with perpetuating the
ability to read and work with it, and there may be advantages to doing
so in certain contexts.

(For a comparison in another context, I don't know of anyone who
generates MOV or RM files anymore; Apple's QuickTime Player has been
dead for a long time, and RealPlayer is sufficiently niche to be
actively worth ignoring IMO. But MPlayer et al. still play files in
those formats just fine.)

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.         -- George Bernard Shaw

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