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

[Rob Savoye]

Steve Holton wrote:

> Gnash will *never* be fully compatible with Flash because the closer
> Gnash gets to being a viable free Flash replacement, the more
> incentive there is for Adobe to change the Flash specification in a
> way to break compatibility.

  They've already changed the format in a big, hence all our hard work
to reverse engineer SWF v9. ActionScript 3 is finally ECMAScript
compatible, same as JavaScript, so I doubt that'll change much in the
future. Also all the changes in SWF v9 were performance oriented, and
that required a new VM. Gnash now does support the SWF v9 format
changes, that was easy. It's implementing the ActionScript class
libraries that's much of the work left. SWF has evolved very slowly, so
I don't feel we'll be chasing Adobe for long.

> Two decades in the Microsoft format wars should have taught that
> lesson to everyone by now. Look how long (and how much) it's taken ODF
> to get where it's at.

  Yes, but as far as I can tell, OpenOffice works well enough with M$
Office, compatibility wise, that I haven't had to use M$ Office for many
years. Not everything converts in OO 100% all the time, but what doesn't
work I can easily live with.

> OTOH, the XO offers us an opportunity to create a new standard among
> an audience which has no investment in the old.  But this is a limited
> opportunity.

  New standards still don't solve the problem of playing existing
content (often proprietary), which is what I though we were discussing.
Also playing SWF files in the future is not something we worry about,
since that will only effect new content, which doesn't exist yet. :-)

  My point is that we want people to work with us. Most of the time all
I hear is "Gnash sucks, it's not 100% compatible yet". We know that
already... What we want to do is identify what "sucks", produce test
cases, and then fix the problems. Bitching about the problem and dumping
Gnash does not solve the problem, it merely ignores it. It's the easy
way out.

 Yes, it can take some time for an end user with a problem to work with
us till we identify what is wrong. As none of us can use the Adobe
player due to clean room problems, it's our end users that help us work
on testing compatibility. Many people have helped contribute to the
development of Gnash merely by helping answer questions about what's
wrong, and trying patches, and most of them were not professional engineers.

  All we are asking for is help beyond just griping, and patience as our
small team pushes forward.

	- rob -