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Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

As much as I want people to stop using Flash for new projects, I'm worried what this means for preservation. There are a lot of old Flash games and other stuff out there that has never been ported to HTML5 and have been abandoned by their creators. A decade from now, we're probably going to need to run an old OS in a VM just to run this old content.

We're at risk of a digital dark age already, and this is just going to make it worse.

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It's an expensive lesson to the society, not to rely on proprietary software for content creation. If we are willing to pay heed to it.

Now let me go back to my open-source community discussions in Slack. ;-)

> A decade from now, we're probably going to need to run an old OS in a VM just to run this old content.

What's wrong with that? Because that path is open, I think Flash games have a much better chance of preservation than most SAAS-projects being developed today.

I don't know if Adobe is planning to open source Flash, but there is GNU Gnash: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

It's actually pretty weird that would stop distributing it, especially since they still distribute a Shockwave Player, and well, Shockwave has been completely dead for long time now.

Even if they continue distributing it, newer operating systems and browsers may not be able to run it.

Shockwave Player is still supported. The latest version was released ~40 days ago[1]

[1] - https://helpx.adobe.com/shockwave/release-note/release-notes...

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