I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time reverse engineering SWF files. There was even a time when Adobe published the SWF file bytecode format. It’s not a terribly complicated format like photoshop psd.

WebAssembly is probably a good target. However flash added a ton of apis in their latest versions. They were so ahead of the game before html5 before even became a thing.

I’m sure Adobe has patents/trademark on some of the things. Also Adobe Flex, that was a god send for rich internet applications. Their components were really well done and I still can’t fine equivalent things in this day and age.

I do strongly believe if Adobe had open sourced big chunks of things, Flash and a number of technologies would still be relevant today. Their big money makers were the IDE’s like Flash Studio, dreamweaver, photoshop etc. The formats and the runtimes should have been open from the get go.

Although it was the Ballmer era when most corporate CEOs truly believed OS was cancer.

Flash was mixed with licensed non-opensource-able stuff and it wasn't a trivial code base in the first place. Given that Adobe hasn't actually made much money off Flash, such an effort would have been likely unfeasible and prohibitively expensive. Someone from the Flash team could chime in here to give more details.

Another option was for Google to buy Macromedia, instead of Adobe. I believe web would have looked completely different today.

This is true. Several aspects of the player were licensed tech. All text rendering, for example.

The _format_ was open, but the implementation was not.

On a sidenote, swf specification was simply great. It was only after I read it that I fully grokked the Flash development (not that I did much of it, because I wasn't a fan of Flash webpages, and couldn't find a way to make money off Flash games).

> However flash added a ton of apis in their latest versions.

Excuse my ignorance: I never used Flash (I was already against abusing the browser for things like that so I only built desktop apps with Delphi etc) but I do use Haxe(with OpenFL) now; is that not supposed to implement those APIs?

Another option might be for them to open source the code and let others do the port. However, there might be legal barriers to doing that if they don't own the rights to it all.

The thing is, Flash is still in use, just not on the web and it's not called Flash. It's called Adobe Animate. Adobe Animate, formerly Flash, is still in use for animating shows on television. Open sourcing Flash would mean creating a potential competitor with Animate, which Adobe surely doesn't want. The only reason Adobe would have to open source Flash is "out of the kindness of their hearts" which is not enough. This is nothing but a needlessly risky business venture to them.

They wouldn’t need to open source the editor, only the player, so competing with Animate shouldn’t be an issue. But yes, there’s not much incentive to open source anything.

Or they could get some of their lawyers to get together a libre but not commercially available license.