[OSM-talk] Flash and open source

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason avarab at gmail.com
Sat May 15 00:11:54 BST 2010


On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 22:51, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
> Aevar Arnfjorth Bjarmason wrote:
>> Making their player open source would be nice. But what's mainly
>> stopping players like Gnash is that their protocols are closed
>
> The SWF and RTMP formats are published. The codecs aren't, but that's
> the whole Ogg Theora/H264 argument for HTML5 and Firefox so not at all
> exclusive to Flash. And unless your translation code is cleverer than I
> thought, they're irrelevant to Potlatch (which is kinda the reason I
> posted here).

At least in 2009 the state of those specs was that they were unusable
for the Gnash project, see e.g.:

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3s-mG5yUjY#t=31m30s

"they released the specs, but the licensing agreement forbids you from
using the specification to write your own implementation". Maybe
that's changed since then.

> The main thing stopping Gnash from supporting AVM2 (and strk can correct
> me if I'm wrong) is that it's a whole big lot of work and there's
> largely only one developer working on it - even though he's basically a
> genius and Potlatch 1 would never have happened without his work on
> Ming. If you threw 100 programmers at Gnash for three months then you'd
> have an open source (non-audio/video) AVM2 player.

I think you need to read The Mythical Man-Month :)

> strk shouldn't have to spend his time rewriting code that Adobe has
> already written. Sun made Java open-source. Flash is a direct parallel.
> I would encourage people not to get hung up on codecs (because Flash has
> already lost the video battle, all video will be HTML5 in two years) and
> encourage Adobe to Do The Right Thing, for the benefit of apps like
> Potlatch and a million others.

Adobe has explicitly said in the past that they can't open source it
because they've used a lot of parts in in that they've licensed from
somewhere else.

Anyway. Good luck with the petition. Personally I think it's about as
likely to succeed as an equivalent petition asking Microsoft to open
source Windows. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.




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