Re: [Gnash] Gnash Digest, Vol 64, Issue 3

[Devin Harper]

Flash on the Web was mostly used for video (with occasional ads and
even more occasional other things).  With the expectation that HTML5
video will gradually take over displaying videos, and free
implementations of HTML5 video in Firefox and other places, volunteers
seem to have less interest nowadays in keeping a free and non-DRM'd.

Flash player running.With all the tout about HTML5 replacing Flash a year or so ago 
and then not seeing it going away in the majority of sites so much 
later, I was not considering it as a reason to abandon a free version of
 Flash. AFAIK Adobe is only retreating from Linux, Android, and ARM, and 
they plan to keep updating and developing their Flash player for desktop
 systems, so they are not going away anytime soon. I think content 
providers know this and continue to develop Flash applications which is 
why Flash has not been replaced by HTML5 in most sites. In fact, there 
are mobile version of sites still just beginning to pop up thanks to the
 lack of Flash on mobile devices. As I am a desktop user, I am not 
expecting to live without Flash anytime soon, for the mobile *versions 
of* sites are the only places where a majority of content is distributed 
in HTML5 and not Flash.

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.

I suppose if AVM2 cannot be added to Gnash, Lightspark cannot be added to Gnash either. Yes, and since there are only maintainers for Gnash now and none of the organizations want to fund a developer to add to Lightspark's limited progress, there is little hope. I'll just keep using Flash, patiently wait for Lightspark, and adopt mobile HTML5 as much as I can.

On Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 9:00 AM, <address@hidden> wrote:

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: There is another OSS Flash alternative. (John Gilmore)
   2. Re: There is another OSS Flash alternative. (Rob Savoye)


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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2012 09:09:17 -0800
From: John Gilmore <address@hidden>
To: Devin Harper <address@hidden>
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Gnash] There is another OSS Flash alternative.
Message-ID: <address@hidden>

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).

Now that we have Lightspeed as a "proof of concept" about how AVM2
works, it should be possible for volunteers to debug and evolve the
AVM2 support in Gnash.  But few free software volunteers know or care
much about Flash.  It takes substantial expertise to debug and
complete an interpreter whose main job is to run other peoples'
mostly-binary-only programs, from a poorly-documented binary
representation.

Flash on the Web was mostly used for video (with occasional ads and
even more occasional other things).  With the expectation that HTML5
video will gradually take over displaying videos, and free
implementations of HTML5 video in Firefox and other places, volunteers
seem to have less interest nowadays in keeping a free and non-DRM'd
Flash player running.

By the way, there IS no "funding from GNU".  In case you hadn't
noticed, in this decade the Free Software Foundation doesn't spend its
time or money writing software.  It figured out that there were
(almost!) enough volunteers doing that -- and that it should focus on
policy issues (like DRM and crystal prisons and cloud computing) that
threaten to subvert the freedom to write and understand your own code
and run it on your own purchased hardware.  The Free Software
Foundation has, very infrequently, chipped in some thousands of
dollars on specific projects, and gnash got such a donation years ago,
but it was something like 1% of the total gnash funding.

        John Gilmore



------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2012 11:31:53 -0600
From: Rob Savoye <address@hidden>
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Gnash] There is another OSS Flash alternative.
Message-ID: <address@hidden>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

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 -




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