[Commons-l] Vorbis implementations in Flash 10

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 3:10 PM, ChrisiPK <chrisipk at gmail.com> wrote:
> If our images can be viewed under Linux even though we know 90% of
> users will in fact be viewing them with Windows, nobody has had any
> moral issues that I know of. Free software/knowledge/images are free,
> because it is allowed to use them virtually everywhere (and not like
> big software companies restricting it to work only with some special
> player software). Why should we force people to use free software?

We shouldn't, obviously. I don't think anyone here has argued that we should.

When the issue came up on foundation-l a little while back, I stated
that I thought a flash file that used only the publicly documented
subset of flash (or at least works in Gnash) and doesn't use the
patented-encumbered codecs would be okay with the board's proposed
file format policy.


So I think David's open ended question is unanswerable. We need to
know "For what?" and "How?".


This is the historical high level four fold set of issues with flash:

(1) Flash is executable software. We do not allow executable *content*
uploads for a multitude of reasons which are not specific to flash.
(Security concerns, the impossibility of validating what non-trivial
executable code really does, etc) But trusted executable things might
still be useful as wikimedia-provided tools. (we do this with Java for
Video today)

(2) The Flash format has (historically) been secret and there has been
no freely licensed implementation.  Adobe has released some specs
although many things are still not disclosed. GNASH is able to run
some older flash code. Only a subset of flash can be run on free
software systems.

(3) Flash video and audio have been some of the most frequently
desired features, but these have *required* the use of patent covered
formats. Users can not legally play these formats without licensed
decoders, and more importantly other publishers can not use them
without paying royalties. We could pay up the licensing offer users a
choice of formats, but other publishers wouldn't have the same
freedoms. GNASH does nothing to help this problem.

(4) No free software flash authoring tools, if anyone who wants to
create or edit flash would need to purchase the expensive editing
tools.

Currently these issues have the following answers:

(1) Isn't relevant for things like uploader widgets, player widgets,
or shims to give IE equivalents to more modern HTML features.

(2) Is still somewhat problematic. Adobe is still churning out
undocumented OPcodes in flash, but if you demonstrate that something
operates in Gnash thats probably pretty good.

(3) Is now potentially avoidable because Flash 10 is a powerful enough
programming language to send clients decoders written for the flash vm
for non-patented formats. All publishers have this option. Using the
non-free formats would still be unacceptable since it would be taking
a liberty that downstream republishers would lack. There now exists a
drop in flash based HTML5 <audio/> replacement for Vorbis decoding. No
one has done video yet, though it's clearly possible now. Performance
for video accomplished in this manner is still an open question.

(4) Is a problem for many things but for things like uploader widgets,
players, and compatibility shims they would most likely be created
with haXe (A free software language for targeting the flash virtual
machine http://haxe.org/), and while author-ability/editability is a
deal-breaker for *content*, it's likely less important for non-content
website machinery. Limiting the developer pool is a serious practical
issue, but haXe addresses that.