Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Petition asks Adobe to open-source Flash

news
Jul 27, 20171 min

Petition on GitHub appears in the wake of Adobe announcing its end-of-life schedule for the Flash Player

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Credit: Thinkstock

With Adobe having just announced its end-of-life schedule for the Flash rich Internet plug-in, a petition has been posted on GitHub encouraging the company to make the Flash source code available under an open source license.

The petition, posted on web developer Juha Lindstedt’s GitHub account, says open-sourcing Flash would be a good solution for keeping Flash content alive for archival purposes. “Flash is an important piece of Internet history and killing Flash Player means future generations can’t access the past. Games, experiments, and websites would be forgotten.” The petition adds that the idea was “not to save Flash Player but to open source Flash!”

Recognizing the emergence of rich media technologies including HTML5, Adobe on Tuesday revealed intentions to stop updating and distributing Flash Player by the end of 2020. Browser vendors including Mozilla and Microsoft have revealed their plans to drop support for Flash within this timeline.

Interested persons can star the petition to signify signing it. Pull requests are welcome, as well. The petition will be delivered to Adobe. Adobe open sourced its Flex framework, an SDK for building Flash applications, in 2008. Flex is now under the jurisdiction of the Apache Software Foundation.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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