No, I think he's pointing out the issues with this that state why we shouldn't use it now; this has agreement, I believe. Not to mention, until Adobe releases those patents or makes Flash an open standard, there will never be a 100% (that's gratis AND libre) implementation of it, ever, as Ben said.
However, the question still remains: why is it the WMF's job to provide a PR boost for a (seemingly) startup? Wouldn't we get further by helping Gnash directly?
Somebody knows somebody, that much appears clear to me now.
Chad
On Jan 20, 2008 12:47 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Nice but what is your point and how does it relate to what is the issue? The issue is that a framework is being developed. It needs open source components to make it work and gnash has been mentioned as one component in all this that needs work. What you describe is exactly the reason why work needs to be done to make this type of content work well on Linux
So you describe that things do not work well. You provide the exact arguments why something needs to be done ... So you are in favour of the proposed collabaration... GREAT Thanks, GerardM
On Jan 20, 2008 6:32 PM, Ben McIlwain cydeweys@gmail.com wrote:
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Brion Vibber wrote:
In many cases that'll cover the same ground as non-free formats; the main exceptions are for patent-encumbered standards (eg, the MPEG family
- MP3, AAC, H.264, etc) and widely-deployed proprietary formats that
have been reverse-engineered by FOSS developers (eg, Flash).
On the subject of Flash, I think it might help to relate my experiences so that everyone on this list knows how deficient it is on free software platforms. (This isn't directed to you Brion, as that'd just be preaching to the choir :-P )
I run GNU/Linux on my laptop. Pretty much everything works and I'm able to do everything I do in Windows, except Flash. First of all, the free software Flash alternatives simply aren't there yet. They aren't good enough for everyday use. And even if they were, they still wouldn't be free, because they're infringing on various patents that Adobe no doubt holds. And the free software stuff isn't good enough to create Flash either, so you still need to pay the tax in the form of the creator program (which as far as I know doesn't run on GNU/Linux). You can see why this is unacceptable.
Even the official Adobe Flash player plugin for Mozilla Firefox on GNU/Linux is deficient. It's treated like a third-rate product by Adobe, sometimes seeing major version updates many months after the Windows plugin is released. In the mean time, new Flash content that depends on the new features simply won't work. And the plugin itself is just bad. It frequently crashes Firefox, some of its functionality plain old doesn't work, etc. And nevermind that it's not free in any sense of the word except gratis; it's all binary, the source isn't available, so it's all entirely anti-libre.
- From where I stand, Flash isn't even an option to be considered in
fulfilling the Foundation's mission statement of "developing educational content under a free license or in the public domain". It won't even run on a completely free system, and it will only run poorly on a partially free system (giving in and installing their binary-only plugin). It is, simply, not what we are looking for. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (MingW32)
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