xboxrulz1405241485 0 Report post Posted January 24, 2006 A new open source version of Flash Player and maybe Flash (builder) is in development. It will be licenced under the GPL v3 and it's built by GNU. anuary 24, 2006 Open Source Flash Player Revealed By Sean Michael Kerner One of the most popular and ubiquitous rich media plug-ins for any browser on almost any platform is the Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash player. Thanks to efforts of the Free Software Foundation, a Free Software Flash player called GNU Gnash is now in active development. The development is apparently occurring without the help or support of Adobe in any way. An Adobe/Macromedia spokesperson was unable to comment on the development. Flash player has always been free, but not in the Free and Open Source Software sense, as it is a proprietary application licensed under a closed source license. GNU Gnash, in contrast, is licensed under the GNU GPL. There are some significant license difficulties with distributing, and to some extent using, proprietary-licensed applications together with GPL-licensed applications. GNU Gnash would eliminate the difficulty with Flash. "Gnash is GPL2'd, and the Free Software Foundation has the copyright," GNU Gnash maintainer Rob Savoye told internetnews.com. "So the standalone player can be used by anyone, but the Flash player code can only be used by other free software projects under the terms of the GPL." The FSF, which is currently undertaking a review of the GPL has actually listed the development of Gnash as one of its top six high-priority projects. Savoye said in mailing-list postings that Gnash has not reverse-engineered its code from the existing Macromedia player. He claims that he is a "clean developer" and has never, "owned any Macromedia tools, signed any license agreements, nor disassembled any Macromedia products. "Gnash has been developed only using freely available documentation and tools, so it can be a free implementation of a closed proprietary format," Savoye explained. Since being formally announced earlier this month, Savoye noted that there is a sizable demand for a GPL-licensed Flash player. While Macromedia's Flash player is available for a number of different platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris, it's not available for others, such as FreeBSD. "So many people are now excited to have a solution for their platforms," Savoye said. "One of the big advantages of free software is the ability of people that have machines I don't own can help make it truly portable." Presently the focus of Gnash is on Flash Player (also referred to by its file extension SWF) version 7 and not the latest version offered by Adobe/Macromedia, which is now version 8. Savoye explained that compatibility for version 8 is on the roadmap, but the current focus is on getting the plug-in working followed by stabilizing the SWF 7 support till it's a fully functional Flash player. "Most Flash movies on the Net are older Flash formats, which is why that's the current focus for the near term," Savoye said. GNU Gnash isn't necessarily starting from scratch either. It is using an existing open source project call GameSWF as a base. According to its Web site, GameSWF is "an open source Public Domain library for parsing and rendering SWF movies, using 3D hardware APIs for rendering." There are a number of big challenges ahead for GNU Gnash, not the least of which is fear of complexity. "The biggest problem is people realize this is a potentially huge project, as Flash is large and complex," Savoye said. "So I think it scares some people off. Most of the other free Flash players haven't gotten very far because of this." Source: http://www.internetnews.com/ xboxrulz Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
szupie 0 Report post Posted January 24, 2006 While a free flash "creator" might be interesting to try, I don't see any purpose in using the Gnash player. The Macromedia Flash Player is already free, and doesn't have any ads in it (it's already odd just to picture Flash having ads). It doesn't say on the site any special functions this software has, so I don't think anyone would download it in the near future, except for testing purposes only. But if it does add extra features (like better control in viewing a flash movie than the Macromedia Player), it'd be worth a try. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
xboxrulz1405241485 0 Report post Posted January 25, 2006 I think it still worth a try to try it regardless if Adobe's Flash player is free. It's not opensource. Yet, Gnash is.xboxrulz Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
hatim 0 Report post Posted January 25, 2006 Well , i was thinking on this topic today. Macromedia surely would never want any thing to compete against its own product. Or should I say Adobe instead of Macromedia..But Imagine if some company had licenced HTML pages and no one else could make HTML pages by law ..or by some other restriction...is it possible to convince Adobe to open up flash or give some sort of support.. if they can make more (non evil) money off it ..may be shipping off a free (not opensource..but retail wise) version of Flash MX studio for Linux / FreeBSD / *NIX (yes i know they have one for apple ..but i am talking about the rest of us). it could be a stripped down version. And for a retail version they can have a souped up thing with all scripting goodies and easy integration with websites.Besides ..MS is launching its own flash like thing. So its not too late to launch a pre-emptive strike. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
unimatrix 0 Report post Posted January 25, 2006 Well , i was thinking on this topic today. Macromedia surely would never want any thing to compete against its own product. Or should I say Adobe instead of Macromedia.. But Imagine if some company had licenced HTML pages and no one else could make HTML pages by law ..or by some other restriction... is it possible to convince Adobe to open up flash or give some sort of support.. if they can make more (non evil) money off it ..may be shipping off a free (not opensource..but retail wise) version of Flash MX studio for Linux / FreeBSD / *NIX (yes i know they have one for apple ..but i am talking about the rest of us). it could be a stripped down version. And for a retail version they can have a souped up thing with all scripting goodies and easy integration with websites. Besides ..MS is launching its own flash like thing. So its not too late to launch a pre-emptive strike. 1064336427[/snapback] There are some area where flash is great. Making online cartoons for instance. But still most flash based sites are evil. As far as Adobe releasing a version for Linux...not bloody likely. Why? Apple almost has to pay them to keep releasing a Macintosh version. However, an extremely high % of Macs have Flash/Dreamweaver and the other Adobe et. al products installed on them. So yes, We're like 8% of of the market, but probably 85% of that market buys those products. I don't think it would be the same for Linux. Here is why: Supporting Linux gets expensive. I know from personal experience that even if you release a version and only support one or two distros (say Redhat/SuSE) all the slackware, debian, and other users will flood your support desk with "hey why won't this work on my system" and get even more ticked off when you say, "Sorry we only support SuSE and Red Hat". That is one reason why I switched to Mac and will not code products for Linux. One of the main reasons why I really, really, really dislike Linux and a large part of it's userbase. The other thing about Linux users is that most non-commicial users (ie home/hobby) often use Linux because they want something for nothing in terms of money. Now there are some shops that use Linux to run Maya. With Maya costing as much as it does....I don't blame them wanting to save money by not having to pay the microsoft tax. Xboxrulz, sorry to pick on you, almost was the poster boy for what I'm talking about in this post: I think it still worth a try to try it regardless if Adobe's Flash player is free. It's not opensource. Yet, Gnash is. Now the business enterprise Linux market....different ball game. Big Blue is supporting Linux and if I were going to buy a big blue system, I'd probably go with Linux for a big huge computer system in a corporate IT world especially if I were migrating from some other type of Unix. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
xboxrulz1405241485 0 Report post Posted January 25, 2006 I understand you clearly unimatrix, but one think that I disagree about Linux costs too much to support is that when you support more than one distribution, all you need to do is that your software isn't fancy and always depends on multiple libraries that you know for sure that it's different on each system.Furthurmore, look at OpenOffice, it's cross-platform, it works on Linux too... why? it doesn't tug on funny libraries.xboxrulz Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
hatim 0 Report post Posted January 26, 2006 Well openoffice is a differntstory. It ahs a weight of an IT giant behind it..Adobe is a giant too ..but not as big as SUN. If you make a sucky product ..you will be plauged with support requests ..but if your application follows som standard..ie LSB , you will probably not end up with a ugly library hog software.I think flash on open source platform would be an excellent oppertunity for macromedia..there is still time before MS and others jump into competetion. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
unimatrix 0 Report post Posted January 27, 2006 Trust me, not all libraries are "standard" and there are quite a few "elite" users going around with custom tweaked boxes where those lib files are on their systems. Now most of those users can usually figure that out themsevles and place dynamic links to where the files should be to where they are. However, experience has taught me otherwise...As far as writing applications, I write programs for video editors and animators. Sometimes using odd libraries for some of the works cannot be avoided. Again where problems come in. However, a lot of our software was coded for the ALPHA platform...which needless to say doesn't exist anymore, so even more odd libraries. I remember working help desk and 60% of our inbox for support requests would be "Does not run on Deibian, or Slackware, or Mandrake, etc." We also had a BSD version of the product that ran on both FreeBSD and OpenBSD with the Linux support libraries installed. Although I am not aware of anyone actually deploying the software on BSD...We were recoding those products for OSX just before the tech bubble burst and the company went under. Which was a shame because the company was $10k from breaking even when it closed in 2000. If they could have gotten another $1M from the VC I think they would started making a profit by 2001, 2002. Instead the company I work for now bought their assets (mainly code) out of liquidation for like $15,000 and hired three of us to work on the project to complete the project for their own internal use. They pay better too... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jorbanks 0 Report post Posted February 14, 2006 Sounds good. Flash is pretty expensive and not everyone can get themselves a copy of it so an open source version might be pretty cool.Looking forward to more updates. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
xboxrulz1405241485 0 Report post Posted February 15, 2006 unimatrix, not everyone is an "elite or 1337" user. Those who are and will be running Linux are mostly "standard" users, an "average joe". They won't know how to create funny libraries, they'll just use it because it just works.For example, Opera and Firefox. They are successful examples because they've been releasing Linux versions when a new software version is created. They support Linux users quite well too.Running into odd libraries wouldn't happen unless the programmer chooses to do so. If the programmer knows that they're going to depend on a weird library, then include it in your binary.xboxrulz Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kalyan1405241522 0 Report post Posted May 17, 2006 Hey nobody is talking about SVG here.. again adobe is comming in picture here...but as well opensource is also there...any body used Sodipodi or inkscape....I used sodipodi ..(unable to install inkscape :-( got depency problemm)I think latter someone will develope a Flash kind player based on SVG....let me give some thing here for SVG though i had little experience with SVG..SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)The moto is pictures need not be saved as pixels they can be saves as formulas.It is basically uses XML to save ... it is very simple...a few sample i give here <line x1="0" y1="0" x2="100" y2="100" style="stroke-width:1; stroke-color='green'" opacity="1"/><rectangel left top height width ><path><g> { for grouping }<circle>it follows complete XHTML format so every tag should be closed and every attribute should be enclosed by double quotes.... lets see......... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
