Adobe opens Flash--How much?

[Rob Savoye]

Edward Cherlin wrote:
> Rob, could you cut through the marketese and give us a breakdown of
> what this Adobe announcement really means for Gnash, if anything? It
> seems to say that developers can use the SWF spec to write players for
> the first time, not just content generators.

  We're still figuring out exactly what this means legally, but the
basic (no real lawyers yet) thought it this will let people that up till
now would have been considered "contaminated", actually contribute to
Gnash. We have had many, many people want to contribute to Gnash which
we couldn't allow due to paranoia about staying clean.

  As far as the specs go, Gnash is far past the point this would be
useful. There is still alot of reverse engineering of the VM needed,
most of the low-level behaviors have never been documented anyway. All
the specs we figured out years ago...

  Although Abode also is opening up the FLV codec, as far as we can tell
it's still patent encumbered due to using Sorenson for the actual codec
in FLV. So Gnash still can't distribute binaries with working YouTube
support on the XO. Major bummer... RTMP was also not opened up, so
things like flash based video conferencing is still under the old EULA.

  I do think this is a good move in the right direction on Adobe's part.
After bugging them about this issue for over almost 2 years, I'm glad to
see they're actually trying to work better with the community. It's
encouraging, and I assume I don't have to worry about being sued by
Adobe anymore. :-)

	- rob -