[OLPC library] [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)

[Rob Savoye]

Carol Lerche wrote:

  Once again I get depressed about everyone's dependence on proprietary
formats, even for worthy causes. :-(

> specific case of Adobe flash, it would be excellent if someone friendly to
> the project could approach Adobe and ask that they allow the plugin to be
> packaged for distribution during school deployments.

  Adobe has been approached many times by various OLPC people in the
past about this... which is why the XO ships Gnash instead. Rather than
continuing to have a nasty dependency on a large company with
proprietary formats that prefers to make money from software licensing,
we'd do better to support Gnash getting more compatible faster. Most of
the bugs we find and aren't that time consuming to fix. We're just a
tiny team of people. With some support we could hit that magical spot
were we play enough of the existing SWF content that nobody cares about
the few things that don't work.

  Our SWF v8 and v9 support is already starting to work, along with
initial support for ActionScript 3, making many new sites work. With
some support (test cases, working with us, funding, engineering) we
could push Gnash ahead much sooner than most people realize is possible.

  While this doesn't solve the problem *now*, it does let us work
towards eliminating this as a problem in the future. I'm also a
homeschooling parent, so thinking about leaving a better future behind
for my children is more important to me than short term goals.

	- rob -