When a Software Dies…
Adobe announced late July that they will stop supporting Flash by the end of 2020. As we all know, Flash used to be a standard tool for web development. That was the time when imagery and animation were still considered innovation rather than standard. People in technology around the world have acknowledged Flash’s contribution in web development. However, it has become a nuisance in recent years. It has slowed browsers and became a hacker-prone multimedia plugin.
TRANSITIONING
That’s the reason why companies or websites that have been using Flash are now transitioning to a different format like HTML5 or WebGL. In fact, only 17% of Chrome users visit a site that depends on Flash everyday. However, some industries like other sciences which conducted their studies using Flash will have problems with transitioning. Not only they don’t have regular programmers to help them, but also it would cost them a lot of money because they have to replicate what they’ve used on their studies.
MAKE IT OPEN SOURCE
After the announcement from Adobe, a group of programmers petitioned on GitHub to make Flash open-source. Although these programmers acknowledge the reasons why Flash should die, they also want to save it for educational purposes. To them, Flash is an important piece of Internet history and killing it means future generations can’t access the past. Games, experiments and websites would be forgotten. They only petition for it to be open source and whatever code Adobe can comfortably release given it’s proprietary licenses.