LWN: Comments on "Interview with Mike Melanson, lead engineer on the Linux Flash Player team (ZDNet)"

Where's the 64-bit plugin? (ZDNet)

bos — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 15:34:47 +0000

In a previous life, I had to occasionally hack on the Linux Flash player source code. It wasn't bad code, but it wasn't very clean, either. I'd have expected a port to a 64-bit environment to take a few months of full-time work for a small team at that time, and the player has become considerably more complex since then.

Considering that most Linux-on-x86_64 users can simply run a 32-bit version of Firefox, and that the regular Flash player works fine there, I can somewhat understand Adobe's lack of urgency in doing a port, especially given the tiny number of prospective users to be satisfied by such work.

The GNU swf player has a laudable goal; if you want to unyoke yourself from reliance on a proprietary vendor whose priorities don't match your own, roll up your sleeves and join in.

Gnash (ZDNet)

job — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 12:06:05 +0000

Silly reasoning. There are lots of users of Evolution, Kontact, and any
of the web based ones. And Exchange is far from the industry standard.
Lotus Notes still has a very large installed base, for example. If there
was a free Exchange server, someone like you would nag about the missing
Notes one instead. There are multiple standard is the world, free and
proprietary alike.

Yes, but ...

JoeBuck — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 05:39:41 +0000

If OpenOffice didn't do an excellent job of reading Microsoft formats far fewer people would be interested, since most of us have colleagues who live in that world.

Similarly, while Flash has its problems, it has a vast number of users.

Gnash (ZDNet)

rqosa — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 03:00:34 +0000

By that reasoning, free software developers should be working on an exact clone of Windows rather than KDE, Gnome, X.Org, etc.

Flash 9 for Linux - why such a long wait?

Los__D — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:43:22 +0000

I'll give that a "me too!"...

It's incredible that they supported Linux when it was almost unknown to most people, but now that it's really getting traction, we see NO new versions!

It feels like a scared MS paid them off or something... :/

Which reminds me, how about a Shockwave player as well?

Where's the 64-bit plugin?

ernstp — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 15:25:39 +0000

If you read their blogs they mention it a couple of time, and that they're working on it!
The problem is that Flash deals with bytecode and that part of the engine seems to be a bit more complicated to port to a 64-bit architecture.
Note that there's no Flash plugin for 64-bit Windows either.

Gnash (ZDNet)

landley — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 15:03:34 +0000

Why support dvd encryption when there are so many unencrypted video
formats? Why support mp3 playback now that ogg exists? Why did people
get so excited about a Linux word processor that could read and write
*.doc files when we already had so many that couldn't? Why does Samba
exist, let alone have millions of users and conferences devoted to it
(such as http://sambaxp.org/)?

If I want to watch the webcast of The Daily Show, I either have the right
plugin or I don't. I can't get the content in another format, and going
to watch something else is not equivalent.

The senior management at my company uses Exchange for calendaring. None
of the engineers do, but we can't drop the Exchange server off the top of
the building into the alley (we have plans) until we can come up with a
compatible replacement to run on a Linux server.

Unfortunately, none of the open source Linux servers we can find actually
replace exchange for calendaring. What the community decided was "screw
the de-facto standard data exchange format tens of millions of people use
today, supporting that's too much like work. Let's come up with a brand
new format that has no users and wasn't designed by users of the old
format either." And they did this in 1998 (check out the dates on rfc
2445 and 2447), and the result has just totally obsoleted all use of
exchange for calendaring everywhere in the 8 years since, hasn't it?

We did find _three_ proprietary Linux programs that can serve calendars
to outlook clients (and even migrate the old exchange database). The
most promising would only install on Red Hat Enterprise 2. But not one
open source one, because any time anybody writes an open source
calendaring application for Linux they use the RFC. I've never found
anybody who actually _uses_one of these RFC-based calendaring apps, and
there are dozens of them already, but people keep writing because they
seem to think the problem is the apps, not the complete inability to
exchange data with the de-facto standard data format that millions of
people are using today.

"The user's problem was too hard to solve, so I invented a different
problem and solved that instead."

Starting to see a pattern here?

Gnash

rqosa — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:37:24 +0000

However, the OpenOffice.org and KOffice projects have made ODF their preferred format and have been promoting ODF extensively. As a result, ODF is gaining adoption. By comparison, the FSF lists Gnash as a "high priority project", and (as far as I know) hasn't been promoting SMIL or other similar formats at all.

Interview with Mike Melanson, lead engineer on the Linux Flash Player team (ZDNet)

timschmidt — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:20:01 +0000

OK. I understand that learning to work with a new API and (re)writing code to that API is a lot of work. But these guys look to be _trying_ to write to non-portable APIs that cover only a fraction of the target audience. Come one! X11 over SDL (especially considering that flash runs on MacOS and Windows), ALSA over gstreamer or SDL? VFL v1?

It may not be their intention to actually make it possible for people to use the plugin, but they should at least be thinking about what the API landscape will look like a year or three down the road (Flash 7, for example, was released in Sep 2003). VFL v1 will be long gone. X11 will be around, but will have drastically different capabilities and performance characteristics.

And coding for ALSA is just plain wrong... When flash tells ALSA to fire up it's stereo sound card, how's ALSA supposed to know that I like browser-related audio to filter through my USB VoIP headphones at 35% volume (and actual VoIP calls at 75%) and not through the network-connected 7.1 audio system in the living room? ALSA's there to make the sound cards do their thing (along with OSS and whatever other OSs offer) - it's not for most applications to play with directly.

I'll be suprised if, in two years time, the commercial flash 9 player works any better on Linux than it does today (which is to say that it works most of the time (except audio) for a few users with the right hardware, so long as they have an old c++ library hanging around, a depricated audio subsystem (or it's successor's legacy compatibility interface) enabled, the right sort of GUI (this means _you_ PDAs and thin clients), and run the OS of Adobe's choice).

Gnash

khim — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 06:33:18 +0000

And how many web-sites actually use SMIL ? Yes, it's not a good world where we must parse proprietary .doc files and proprietary .swf files instead of using open formats like ODF, SMIL or SVG. Yet it's the world we live in...

Gnash (ZDNet)

rqosa — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 05:55:16 +0000

Why bother reverse-engineering a proprietary format when there exists a W3C Recommendation that can be used to accomplish many of the same tasks?

Flash 9 for Linux - why such a long wait? (ZDNet)

pr1268 — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 04:56:58 +0000

I'm personally curious why Flash version {8,9} for Linux is taking such a long time to develop... My general impression is that the developers at Adobe are pedaling as fast as they can to bring us Linux users Flash 9. Yet, this version has been around for some time in Windows and Mac. Why so long? Did they write the entire thing in such a non-portable fashion as to require an entire code re-write?

Gnash

beoba — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 03:29:35 +0000

Only somewhat related to this article: Does anyone know Gnash's current status? Has much changed in the past couple months?

Gnash (ZDNet)

coriordan — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 21:07:59 +0000

No mention of Gnash in the interview. Strange.

Where's the 64-bit plugin? (ZDNet)

alspnost — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 20:25:48 +0000

No, I saw that, but what I mean is that the interviewer should have pushed them harder on that point. As far as I know, people have been nagging them for ages, via that form and other means, but clearly it hasn't achieved anything yet. The 64-bit issue is just lame in late 2006 - they should have made him squirm with that a bit!

Where's the 64-bit plugin? (ZDNet)

kh — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 20:09:44 +0000

I think you missed this:

one suggestion I would make to the community is to use the Adobe Wish Form to make specific feature requests, such as support for 64-bit and PowerPC platforms and alternate OS such as FreeBSD, so the comments are more productive.

I'm hoping for the gnu version myself.

Where's the 64-bit plugin? (ZDNet)

alspnost — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 18:51:27 +0000

What, no mention of the glaring, absurd omission of a 64-bit Flash plugin, after all these years? Not that I'm bothered any more, since I've gone back to 32-bit and use a Flash-free browsing setup. But I know a lot of people could really use this.