Re: [Gnash] There is another OSS Flash alternative.

[John Gilmore]

The Gnash team spent significant effort toward making gnash work with
AVM2, but AVM2 was very badly documented and we never got it to
initialize a working AVM2 environment.  Then gnash's traditional
funding sources ran out (for unrelated reasons).

Now that we have Lightspeed as a "proof of concept" about how AVM2
works, it should be possible for volunteers to debug and evolve the
AVM2 support in Gnash.  But few free software volunteers know or care
much about Flash.  It takes substantial expertise to debug and
complete an interpreter whose main job is to run other peoples'
mostly-binary-only programs, from a poorly-documented binary
representation.

Flash on the Web was mostly used for video (with occasional ads and
even more occasional other things).  With the expectation that HTML5
video will gradually take over displaying videos, and free
implementations of HTML5 video in Firefox and other places, volunteers
seem to have less interest nowadays in keeping a free and non-DRM'd
Flash player running.

By the way, there IS no "funding from GNU".  In case you hadn't
noticed, in this decade the Free Software Foundation doesn't spend its
time or money writing software.  It figured out that there were
(almost!) enough volunteers doing that -- and that it should focus on
policy issues (like DRM and crystal prisons and cloud computing) that
threaten to subvert the freedom to write and understand your own code
and run it on your own purchased hardware.  The Free Software
Foundation has, very infrequently, chipped in some thousands of
dollars on specific projects, and gnash got such a donation years ago,
but it was something like 1% of the total gnash funding.

        John Gilmore