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.