On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 5:06 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/11/24 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
I'll forward you the longer off-list reply I wrote to David.
I only just looked up and realised you hadn't sent it to the list :-) You should, it's the first I'd heard of Haxe.
Meh. You're thwarting my resolution to not be personally responsible for the majority of any mailing list's volume. I'm trying to use off-list replies unless I see a fair amount of discussion on the list. Oh well. There is some redundancy with the shorter public message I posted today after chrisipk's response.
The idea basically being that Flash is probably fine now for particular limited uses, that we should try hard to avoid it for some others, and that we ought not to use it at all for others still, depending on a whole bunch of details.
On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 8:05 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 7:12 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
If a .swf served by us works in Gnash even though we know 99.9% of users will in fact be using it in Adobe Flash, is that free software enough for us, morally as well?
"Works in gnash" is insufficient in the general case.
For *content* on the sites it must also be authorable with free tools. You can now create some subsets of flash with tools like haxe, but flash is not generally editable without the fairly expensive Adobe tools.
Gnash is also often combined with non-free codecs, Gnash + non-free bits is an obviously insufficient test.
Specific to this discussion:
These decoders will not work in gnash, nor do I believe there is any near term prospect. Gnash is fairly far behind flash, and Alchemy uses many totally undocumented VM opcodes.
But I do not think it's all that relevant to this discussion because the use of Flash would only be as a fall back for other free technology (<audio/> and <video/> in this case), and it's a fall back that *all* publishers could use (so long as the SWF itself were freely licensed). Worth mentioning is that roughly 1/3 of our traffic is already firefox.
For the moral test you need to consider two groups: (1) Users and (2) publishers. We ought not distribute files that requires users to use non-free software, and we ought not to distribute files that other publishers couldn't distribute without software or patent licensing.
Flash with a free software SWF player as a fallback to HTML5 <video/>/<audio/> that plays Vorbis/Theora passes both those tests. Users can use Firefox 3.1 (or Java, or a future opera version, or Safari+XiphQT, or...) and not use any problematic software, and other publishers can do exactly what we do without any licensing. *Or at least this will be true once these things exist* We're not there yet, it's just that it's clearly possible now.
This wasn't true prior to Flash ~10: Prior versions of flash required media be available in non-free formats (MP3/AAC/H264/etc), so even if we offered an Ogg version, we'd fail the publisher moral-test because other publishers would not have the option of the Flash fallback.
Other places where I think flash would be okay:
- Freely licensed SWF upload widget (so long as we have an equal or
better Java alternative, or a HTML5 feature)
- Freely licensed SWF replacement for the HTML <canvas> tag, so long
as we have equal (or better) support for the real canvas tag.
- Freely licensed SWF interactive graphing widget, so long as we work
equally well using <canvas> and JS.
The idea being that flash is generally okay if it does not create an imposition on users and other publishers could do the same things.
A harder question:
*Flash that was created in HAXE (free authoring) and works in GNASH (without non-free addons), but has no other free equivalent.
I think I'd like to say that such a beast would not be strictly impermissible but actually validating that it didn't require non-free tools to create, and that it could work in GNASH are likely to be a big pain. And that it's would be unfortunate to promote Flash while gnash is such a useless alternative. (Flash ain't done till Gnash won't run, dontcha know?)