I wish Adobe had open sourced Flash - it really was a pretty amazing tool. They could have owned the proprietary developer tool market to support themselves...
If it was possible they would have loved to - certainly by 2012 or so, and more likely by 2008-9. The reason I heard they couldn't is that by that time Flash Player was a massive 10+ year old codebase with lots of parts that were licensed or external, and nobody had ever tracked which parts would be to be relicensed or rewritten.
Source: I worked there at the time and knew the relevant PMs.
A lot of people - including studios who use it for projects that can take years to complete - were very unhappy at the prospect of having the only tool that can read their mountains of FLA files (the file format the Flash/Animate editor uses, and used to compile into a SWF) stop working because Adobe turned off the auth servers. Adobe has pulled back to "okay we're, uh, putting it in maintenance mode, expect no new features, ever, just security patches".
If you follow their mea culpa link, it says they're keeping (a type of) support.
> Adobe Animate is in maintenance mode for all customers...
> Maintenance mode means we will continue to support the application and provide ongoing security and bug fixes, but we are no longer adding new features.
Of course, in my experience, such a lifeline never lasts much longer than the furor that earned it...
Yeah, if I was in a Animate studio I sure would be putting some energy for the entire last month into finding a good crack for it so we could deal with our old files, and talking about our plans for how to deal with the major hit the production pipeline would take when we picked a new animation program and started retraining everyone on it.
A lot of people made the choice to use proprietary tools for their creative work flow, rather than making do with and pushing for better open source equivalents.
I have some sympathy for them - I am sure they felt it was the only real choice at the time - but not a whole lot.
There were zero open-source options at the time. Flash/Animate was the only digital ink-n-paint solution that was even vaguely affordable to the hobbyist or small studio for many years. Most studio-quality 2D programs were proprietary solutions developed in big studios like Disney.
People started using Flash for professional work around 1995. "Open source" barely existed as a concept then, Wikipedia tells me the name "open source" was coined in 1998 and it took a while before anyone but programmers gave even half a damn about it.
The first open-source studio-quality 2D animation package I know of was OpenToonz from 2016, which was a relicensing of a commercial package that dates back to the late eighties or the early nineties - Wikipedia just mentions v3 from 1993.
But anyway now there is a dude working on an open-source Flash clone that can read the editor source files, so all these people you have next to no sympathy for have something to celebrate.
I was introduced to "free software" and the GPL in 1986, as a PhD student at the European Molecular Biology Lab (Heidelberg).
Your historical revisionism doesn't sit well. Yes, "open source" came later because some people didn't like the specifics of the GPL and wanted a term that could describe "source available" software under a variety of license. But by 1998, I'd already been contributing to GPL'ed projects for more than a decade.
I'm well aware of the lack of free/libre alternatives to Flash. But that wasn't my point at all. I'm not saying that people failed by choosing Flash over some (mythical) free/libre alternative. I'm saying they failed by choosing Flash, period.
Before proprietary software, there were almost no creative tools that were proprietary. Nobody bought proprietary paint, or proprietary paint brushes, or proprietary table saws, or propriety anything. The software showed up, and everyone was so gaga about what you could do with it that they just forget about the fact that XYZ Corp. controlled the tools 100%, and dived in. There were people warning them, but those people were ignored.
I wish he had gone into more detail around 'A common critique of HTMX is that users lose the ability to use the “Back” button or share specific filtered views. In many frameworks, this requires complex series of state hooks to keep the URL in sync.'
He makes it sound like he did something special, but this is just something that htmx offers out of the box. In fact if he had used something like:
<a href="/?page=2" hx-target="#dashboard-content" hx-boost="true">
Next Page
</a>
Then he would have gotten the functionality out of the box without even using hx-push-url explicitly. And he would have gotten graceful degradation with a link that worked without JS and Ctrl/Cmd-click to open in a background tab.
Also the article seems to be full of errors. Eg
> In HTMX, if the server returns a 500 error, the browser might swap the entire stack trace or the generic error page into the middle of a table by default. This is a poor user experience.
This is simply incorrect. By default htmx does not swap 4xx/5xx responses. Instead it triggers an error event in the DOM. Developers can choose to handle that event or they can choose to override the default behaviour and do a swap.
The Essentials of Compilation (using Racket) by Jeremy Siek links to this[0] which when downloaded says "An Incremental Approach in Python" and is in Python.
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