Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC trial of embedded Flash video

[Jon Grant]

Hiya,

Ciaran O'Riordan wrote on 20/05/07 14:58:
> Jon Grant <address@hidden> writes:
> > GNU supporting Adobe's Flash format is a shame.
>
> The goal of the GNU project is to make it as easy as possible for people to
> choose to never use non-free software.  This means we need free software to
> do the jobs that people use their computers for.

Agreed, the pragmatism prong of an broad strategy, to help those who are
not convinced on a purely FS "ideas" basis.

> > If I were them, I would
> > have put all my effort into
>
> This is where campaigns differ from corporate initiatives.  When a
> corporation starts an initiative, they know how much resources they have.
> With campaigns, you're relying on external support, and you can't predict
> what that will amount to.
>
> On this issue, both approaches were tried.

Do you mean trying an initiative and a campaign? or trying to develop a 
plugin and
media component of a browser at the same time?

> Gnash is the GNU project to develop a free Flash player.  Surprisingly, its
> developers have raised ten million euro in funding for it's development.  So
> this effort has been more effective than any planner could have predicted.

10M, great! I hope some of that money can be put towards a migration
path away from Adobe's Flash, to a modern media, animation, scripting
system which is Free Software and cross-platform compatible.

> For the other approach, FSF have launched http://playogg.org

This looks like a good counter to MS's PlaysForSure, I raised an idea along
those lines with RMS (back in 2004 as I remember it).

> > GNU don't promote Word
> > documents now that OOo has great support for the file-format:
> > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
>
> True, and I don't think they will ever promote Flash either.

By developing a single pronged "implement flash plugin" strategy isn't
that what they've done though? Also they would not put up an "anti flash"
statement, like they did with MS-Word. Maybe they've not seen how many sites
rely on Flash now...

...if the strategy does change, they may be stuck with all their code in
a plugin based format, and not written as part of the browser
framework/core/engine etc.

I expect that when GNU Flash is complete, Adobe will accept that there is
no gain from proprietary Flash plugin then, and open it up to us. Shame it
always takes a replacement implementation to achieve that! ... but then
we still won't have the modern, media capable browser software I was
hoping for!

Cheers, Jon