Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 1st May 2008 12:44 UTC
Just yesterday Mozilla Europe's Tristan Nitot predicted that Adobe might open source Flash one day if competition from Microsoft's Silverlight got too fierce. It seems as if he can look into the future, as today Adobe has announced the Open Screen Project. While not exactly an open source announcement, it does open the door a little bit more.
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RE[3]: What does it mean for Open Source?
by liamdawe on Thu 1st May 2008 13:39
in reply to "RE[2]: What does it mean for Open Source?"
Member since:2006-07-04
RE[4]: What does it mean for Open Source?
by lemur2 on Thu 1st May 2008 13:57
in reply to "RE[3]: What does it mean for Open Source?"
Member since:2007-02-17
I tried gnash but it's really not up to scratch with what i need it for 
Hopefully its development will accelerate now.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=571
"The source code for the Flash player is still closed source and proprietary, but removing restrictions on licensing and even looking at the format specifications goes a long, long way towards alleviating fears of vendor lock-in. This will give a boost to open source players like Gnash and swfdec. While it's unlikely that the open source players will ever catch up to the performance and features in the official Adobe player, it's nice to have the option to get the technology from multiple places in case something happens to Adobe such as, say, getting acquired by Microsoft."
I think there is a strong chance that zdnet significantly under-rates the power of open source development.
It doesn't look like gnash is ever going to be a "Google Summer of Code" project, though. !!
Edited 2008-05-01 14:05 UTC
Member since:
2007-02-17
Adobe's Flash 9 binary blob crashes quite a bit when used in conjunction with Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
I believe this is due to Hardy's inclusion of PulseAudio ... apparently this is the piece that doesn't play well together with Adobe's flash 9 binary blob for Linux.
There is a library that you can get that does enable it to kinda work ... but there are still crashes.
I removed Adobe's Flash 9 blob, and installed Gnash 0.8.2-0ubuntu3 on my Ubuntu Hardy install ... I can still use Youtube, and I haven't had a crash yet (although I haven't been using it long). Certainly I can now do some actions without crashing that used to reliably crash Firefox 3beta5 viewing Youtbue using Adobe Flash 9.