Re: [Gnash] There is another OSS Flash alternative.

[Rob Savoye]

On 11/02/12 11:09, John Gilmore wrote:

> The Gnash team spent significant effort toward making gnash work with
> AVM2, but AVM2 was very badly documented and we never got it to
> initialize a working AVM2 environment.  Then gnash's traditional
> funding sources ran out (for unrelated reasons).

  I've often considered restarting a significant AVM2 implementation for
Gnash, but this would be full-time work for many months. To launch such
an effort would require stable funding at a level enough that a
developer could at least pay their basic bills (mortgage/rent, food).
Nobody seems willing to fund such a task, I've talked to most everyone,
Google, Mozilla, Canonical, etc... They all prefer users just install
the Adobe flash player. :-( Obviously these Open Source companies care
little about Free Software.

  Note that this task wouldn't be adding AVM2 support to Gnash. It would
be a new code base, with as much code refactored from current Gnash as
possible. A complete rewrite of Gnash this way could have substantial
performance benefits, but as mentioned, this could easily turn into a
multi-year task nobody wants to fund. Also after several years of
development, Lightspark is still barely able to handle YouTube videos,
much less generic flash files.

        - rob -