What does everyone think? Is this a worthy cause? [LWN.net]

What does everyone think? Is this a worthy cause?

Posted May 15, 2009 19:23 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not sure...does anyone involved with the project know anyone who owns a Porsche? :)

Worthy indeed

Posted May 16, 2009 21:05 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Well, Gnash V9 might make a good model name for a luxury car ;) But free Flash would remove one of the few remaining proprietary bits on my systems. Even though flashblock makes it bearable, I bet that outsourcing the video playing tasks to MPlayer would make youtube go smooth.

Now if only unrar-free worked well enough...

What does everyone think? Is this a worthy cause?

Posted May 16, 2009 0:57 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

I guess the question is whether they can identify specific, qualified developers who will get the funding, or not. If there a couple of smart students ready to spend all summer working hard on Gnash, who just need to raise some money to fund their education, then we're talking the proven Summer of Code model.

What does everyone think? Is this a worthy cause?

Posted May 16, 2009 12:10 UTC (Sat) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link] (4 responses)

> I'm considering making a donation to this. What's the consensus? Is this a worthy cause or not?

I just donated. It seems worthy to me.

FOSS Flash that works is an important goal, even though I personally don't like Flash as a technology, and even though I'm not a big fan of FOSS playing catchup by reimplementing existing proprietary code (I prefer that we innovate). But, this is still critical for promoting Linux on the desktop, in both the short and the long term.

What does everyone think? Is this a worthy cause?

Posted May 16, 2009 19:41 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (3 responses)

And Gnash seems to be going in the right direction.

I have a old Pentium3-M Dell Inspiron laptop with Debian Unstable that I was trying out different flash techologies on... Gnash came closest in performance and compatibility with the proprietary Adobe flash. Swfdec seemed fine, too, but it was much too slow for this laptop.

What does everyone think? Is this a worthy cause?

Posted May 17, 2009 1:57 UTC (Sun) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (2 responses)

The problem is that we have two (gnash and swfdec), and it's unclear to me which horse to back.

What does everyone think? Is this a worthy cause?

Posted May 17, 2009 14:28 UTC (Sun) by andrel (guest, #5166) [Link] (1 responses)

Both horses!

Good idea

Posted May 17, 2009 16:25 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Sure! That way, if one tool cannot do the job then the other will. I have no problem in having evince and xpdf installed; or xine and mplayer. Now if only it were easier to switch between Flash plugins in Firefox...

Very worthy

Posted May 17, 2009 16:44 UTC (Sun) by Velmont (guest, #46433) [Link] (2 responses)

I love Gnash. I'm using it for every site I visit. If I meet a flash file it can't decode I switch to PP (Proprietary Player), Firefox makes that two button clicks.

But I'm donating directly to the project instead, because strangely people are very into donating to/paying students but not the actual core project. I want them to use the money as they see fit, if they can get enough money to be able to work some extra hours a month on it, I'm very happy.

Although, I'm a starving student myself so it's not like they'll feel my contribution. (But if hundreds more did the same ... !)

Bounties?

Posted May 18, 2009 15:57 UTC (Mon) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

I wonder if you could put a "bounty" on a Flash-based site you want to use -- Assassination Politics style -- and when Gnash works, whoever made it work gets the money, whether it was a site webmaster or a Gnash developer. What's the status of Gnash for iPhone? Would be useful to have an army of iPhone users as a reason for webmasters to test with Gnash.

Very worthy

Posted May 19, 2009 20:45 UTC (Tue) by oska (guest, #25556) [Link]

Sorry, I may be a bit thick, but can you describe more explicitly how you have Firefox set up so that it uses Gnash but you still have the option of using the proprietary player?

What does everyone think? Is this a worthy cause?

Posted May 21, 2009 20:56 UTC (Thu) by ssam (guest, #46587) [Link]

there are good reasons for a GPL flash player beyond just the free software utopia we dream of.
* better compatibility with other linux software eg new browsers, sound systems etc. adobe flash player is/was one of the big things holding back pulseaudio.
* cross platform. adobe flash player was one of the things that held people back from moving to 64bit. but suppose you want flash on an arm/mips netbook? what if you want to use powerpc? what if you want to use some obscure OS amiga, beos, haiko.
* OLPC. they aren't going to ship the adobe player
* security. privacy (you know about flash cookies right?)

the money is going to students so that's good too.