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Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge)Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge)Posted Feb 10, 2006 21:17 UTC (Fri) by jamienk (subscriber, #1144)In reply to: Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) by coriordan Parent article: Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge)
You make some good points. But I still feel that FSF should encourage making a FLASH (the program) replacement, not just a Free Flash viewer. Flash (the program) has so many annoying things about it -- first and foremost that it doesn't integrate well with the rest of my web development process. SVG has so much potential here. I'm convinced that, unlike PNG, people will create SVG animations if there is a great authoring tool -- and since the spec is so open and web-oriented, other tools are already available.
A big part of what's wrong with Flash from a user's perpective is that the proprietariness of the format makes it work so poorly with the rest of the web. I suppose that that issue goes more to the practical side of Free software than to the moral side, but it is why SWF is different from GIF. GIF was screwed up by patents more than anything else. Flash is a bloated unstable plugin that doesn't even work on some platforms. Flash should be replaced because it sucks, not just because it's evil. Sometimes it might be easier to defeat evil when it sucks really badly.
PNG was basically the same as GIF, but unencumbered. Its best new feature of alpha transparency couldn't be taken advantage of to a great extent until style sheets became better supported and understood. Now-a-days, many web developers (even those oblivious to issues of Freedom) go out of their way to use PNG in websites; a whole cottage industry has sprung up to make IE properly handle the format through various hacks.
http://www.google.com/search?q=png+transparency+ie
In fact, PNG seems to be on more and more web developers' minds as they try to do cool stuff with the newer technologies... This, no doubt, has put pressure on MS to better support it...
Sorry for the long-wind!
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Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 13, 2006 1:09 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] PNG is superior to GIF in many ways..
More then 256 colors, better lossless compression, support of a alpha layer, so on and so forth.
Now flash on the other hand...
Sure it sucks. But Unix sucks and if it was up to RMS and friends they probably would of built something like a Lisp machine rather then a Unix clone except that they knew that it being Unix-like made it compatable with a wide veriaty of already existing software and lots of people were already familar with it.
And I don't know how superior SVG animations would be to Flash. Sure SVG is more open, and that is wonderfull, but with it's XML format and such everything that I've seen so far that uses SVG has added lots of overhead.
I think that it's likely that in order for SVG to do things similar to Flash it would end up nearly as bloated and slow as flash is.
But I don't know that for a fact. In fact I would much prefer SVG, but I still have my reservations.
And then there is the problem of Microsoft.
Microsoft is barely able to deal with CSS standards accepted years ago by everybody else. They still haven't figured out how to make their own ActiveX crap work worth a damn in a secure manner... and since their browsers dominate the market...
And doesn't MS have competing technologies such as Avalon and some "flash killer" of their own?
How long do you suppose it's going to be for Microsoft to support SVG animations in their browser? Especially when SVG == Free software folks and doesn't contribute in any way to their bottom line and they have other competiting things that would help them lock customers in furthur?
Flash works right here, right now, and SVG doesn't. That's all there is to that.
Hell MS still doesn't support PNG worth a damn either.. even though pretty much every other company in existance does since.
Maybe look at PNG vs TIFF rather then PNG vs GIF when thinking about Flash versus SVG.
PNG is superior in almost every conceivable way to TIFF... but you have people swearing up and down that Tiff is the 'standard' and that everybody uses 'tiff'..
Even though there are over 50 different incompatable versions of Tiff formats out there.. Adobe has it's own Tiff. There are lossless uncompressed tiffs, there are lossy compressed tiffs, there are lossless compressed tiffs (with very bad lzw compression), etc etc..
And PNG is better then almost all of them, yet you'll have people looking down their noses at it.
Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 13, 2006 3:49 UTC (Mon) by jamienk (subscriber, #1144) [Link] FSF has a lot of clout. If they get behind a project, they advocate for it, they get listened to by smart people, they build momentum. They can't snap their fingers and make something happen, but they can influence "the community's" priorities.
Should they focus of removing blockers for people who might otherwise switch from MS or Apple? That seems to be their motivation for supporting Gnash as a "high priority" project: MS or Apple users expect it, but they cannot find Free versions of it.
OTOH, FSF could also make it a high priority of their's to encourage new, competing technologies. The Web is a competing technology to AOL's old network, ssh is a competitor to MS Remote Desktop Connection, and BitTorrent is a competitor to who-knows-what, in ways that go beyond OOo vs MSOffice, GIMP vs Photoshop, etc. They set a new standard, create a new demand.
The choice isn't one that should be made one time, and applied to everything. But our question here is which path to choose with regards to Flash.
It seems like a good idea to try to clone applications and functionality and spend lots on getting interoperability when those things are truly indispensable to users, and when a better, simpler, easier, more powerful solution can't be thought of.
I question whether Flash is truly indispensable at this point. Many web developers embrace it, computer distributors make it ubiquitous, and you see it a lot. But it also annoys users, hobbles developers, and is usually used to be Flahsy, not to do something useful or important. It isn't just a bad implementation of a good idea -- it feels fundamentally bolted-on to the web. The proprietariness of it can be FELT: you can't right-click it, it won't intermingle with the rest of the page, the back button won't work, your mouse wheel won't work to scroll, you hear your plugin rev up your processor... And the development tools are completely separate from the rest of your web work: you can't use your Javascript to access it (at least not easily), you can't integrate it with HTML forms (without a kludge), you can't use css with it, you can't use your images with it unless you integrate them inside the "Flash" program... etc.
SVG other hand, has none of these drawbacks. It also has a lot of thought behind it, growing mementum, and potential as far as the eye can see.
Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 17, 2006 20:55 UTC (Fri) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link] drag beat me to this point, but GNU is built upon copying inferior but de-facto standard programs. Unix. C. The unix shell. Tar. Make. Roff. Awk. Sed. It has rarely succeeded by developing alternatives. Pushing a new standard to acceptance is hard--hard enough that even giant companies like Sun have a hard time doing it (see how long it took Java to catch on). The FSF does have clout, but not enough I think to replace Flash. As coriordan noted, we still haven't killed GIF, which should have been much easier than killing Flash!Moreover, remember GNU is not primarily a technology movement, it is a social movement. Making it possible for more people to live their lives with free software is a high priority, and if Flash is a blocker for people, it makes sense for the FSF to focus their efforts on it. As a confirmed Flash hater myself, I grudgingly welcome the FSF's effort. Just as I hate proprietary office formats but am thankful for OpenOffice (now that it is finally tolerable to use), because it helps me get along with the world without giving up my freedom. Furthermore, it integrates into my system much better than a proprietary program would; I expect that likewise Gnash will behave much better in the browser environment than the proprietary Flash plug-in. A great Gnash integration could make Firefox even more appealing and draw more people to free software.
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