Gnash Project

Adobe has launched a website where they apparently wish to host an "open source" community. They apparently mostly use this to host the part of their documentation that's not tained. (Unlike, say, their SWF documentation.)

What is interesting here is also that they appparently run their "BlazeDS" project from this site. As far as I can tell this is a Java project, although its purpose is not known to me. Another notable missing thing is the license under which it is available; although it appears to include several free software bundles, the source document tree doesn't seem to have a license. I have a feeling some of those included bundles are GPL, so with that Adobe would be violating the GPL.

Gnash is now included in the latest release of Yellow Dog Linux.

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Original Link

OVELAND, Colorado - 5 February 2008 - Terra Soft today released Yellow Dog Linux v6.0 for Sony PS3, Apple G4/G5, and IBM System p. Built upon the CentOS foundation, a popular derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), YDL v6.0 offers enterprise quality for the home user.

Someone was kind enough to package gnash and make it run on the PS3: http://blogs.ydl.net/billdar/2007/09/12/flash-for-ydl-using-gnash/

Rob Savoye wrote:

"The forth alpha release of Gnash has just been made at version
0.8.1. Gnash is a GPL'd Flash movie player and browser plugin for
Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript2 classes. Gnash also runs on many GNU/Linux distributions, embedded GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, non x86 processors, and 64 bit architectures. Ports to Darwin and Windows are in progress for a future release. The plugin works best with Firefox 1.0.4 or newer, and should work in any Mozilla based browser. There is also a standalone player for GNOME or KDE based desktops.

During this week, some one ported gnash to yet another OS, namely 'Syllable'.

Here is a picture of gnash running under Syllable:

Original Link

Spotlight on Gnash
Wed, 2007-08-01 00:50 — dcp

Blue GNU interviews Rob Savoye, of the Gnash project, to provide readers an understanding of the project - how it began and where it is heading.

When and why was Gnash started?

Gnash initially was started as an embedded Flash player for a digital stereo system about 3 years ago. Then John Gilmore asked me if I'd be interested in turning it into a desktop plugin for Firefox, which I did. That attracted attention to the Gnash project, which has been under heavy development since. My main reason for starting Gnash was it seemed a great solution for embedded user interfaces for CE devices. That and it was getting impossible to navigate the web without a flash plugin, as I have always refused to install the proprietary one.

Original article with images

By Mitch Meyran

Gnash is the Free Software Foundation’s alternative Adobe Flash player. Version 0.8 is the third alpha release, and frankly, it rocks! It is also one of the first projects to be covered by the GPLv3.

About Gnash
Some history

Originally based on GameSWF, it is a reimplementation of Macromedia/Adobe Flash version 7, with some stuff from Flash 8/9 added. It is, right now, the most advanced free software implementation of Flash. And, as a matter of fact, it actually works well in many cases.

Gnash has now switched to the GPLv3 license, see http://gplv3.fsf.org for more info.

A little over a week ago, the r500 reverse engineering project announced its first release. The driver is not yet functional and doesn't yet support the X1800 and above, but support is expected soon.

Why is this important to Gnash? Because a lot of people are interested in hardware OpenGL acceleration for Gnash graphics. Unfortunately, many recent 3D cards cannot be used with free software drivers, which is why some of our developers shy away from developing Gnash using the OpenGL backend.

The third alpha release of Gnash has just been made at version
0.8.0. Gnash is a GPL'd Flash movie player and browser plugin for
Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera. Gnash supports many SWF v7
features and ActionScript2 classes. Gnash also runs on many GNU/Linux
distributions, embedded GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, non x86
processors, and 64 bit architectures. Ports to Darwin and Windows are
in progress for a future release. The plugin works best with Firefox
1.0.4 or newer, and should work in any Mozilla based browser. There is
also a standalone player for GNOME or KDE based desktops.