alt Hacker NewsThere 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.
> "Open source" barely existed as a concept then,
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.