Gnash, Lightspark, and Shumway [LWN.net]

Gnash, Lightspark, and Shumway

Posted Nov 22, 2012 0:43 UTC (Thu) by n8willis (editor, #43041)
In reply to: Gnash, Lightspark, and Shumway by dtalen
Parent article: Gnash, Lightspark, and Shumway

Mac and Windows users will continue to use the proprietary plugin,

They might ... unless Shumway makes headway and gets rolled into Firefox. I have no idea if that's the plan, obviously, but I suspect that no-plugin-required-built-in-Flash-decoding would sound like a plausible bullet point to Mozilla High Command.

As did built-in-PDF-decoding, for instance.

Nate

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Gnash, Lightspark, and Shumway

Posted Nov 22, 2012 22:25 UTC (Thu) by speedster1 (subscriber, #8143) [Link]

It seems like firefox needs to come up with a decent flash interpreter of some sort in the near future, and shumway does sound simpler to work with than a solution that requires cooperation between 2 separate plugins. Unless of course, they really don't care about losing a lot more Linux users to chrome...

As a current gnash user, I would be happy to see fellow linux firefox users help fund gnash rather than jumping ship to chrome, but it just doesn't seem to be happening yet.

Gnash, Lightspark, and Shumway

Posted Nov 23, 2012 15:17 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

I've always been disappointed by the number of free software users that just installed the proprietary plugin and declared the problem solved. The small userbase of gnash and then lightspark has greatly limited the developer base and thus speed of progress.

I know it's always been easier, but the free software ecosystem isn't always about doing what's easiest. Dogfooding matters.

Yes it's true that I've never sent any patches either (I have no clue how any of this stuff works), but I have at least reported some bugs, and donated to gnash. A few thousand more people doing that for that last 4 years or so would (probably) have helped a great deal. I can't help but feel that we have collectively failed to deal well with this issue.