Re: [Gnash-dev] Hardware acceleration support

[Gwenole Beauchesne]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2010, John Gilmore wrote:

> there was lots of concern among free software developers that it's an 
> Intel trojan horse to get proprietary drivers embedded in the free 
> ecosystem.

Please define "lots of concern", who, what? Nobody said anything like 
this.

Your link to Fedora is irrelevant. Their only fear for not including 
VA-API was because the G45 driver *is* *fully* Open Source and they don't 
want to ship implementations for non-free codecs. If the driver was 
proprietary, libva would probably be included already...

This probably means they won't be shipping with Gnash either, anyway. Or 
any other media player or multimedia framework (e.g. GStreamer) because 
this is a trap to use non-free codecs, isn't it?

Besides, why is Gnash supporting H.264 codecs then? Why not just remove 
H.264 support from Gnash since it's non-free? And why not even remove the 
whole code since the whole x86 architecture ("x86 Alliance") is an Intel 
trojan horse to get proprietary software included in your free ecosystem? 
You wouldn't be left with many choices but probably some SPARC 
implementations.

>  And that half the work was done by Gwenole, presumably
> under contract to Intel.

Don't presume anything. There is no such thing. We don't even have *any* 
business with Intel, at all. We would have been pleased, though. But as a 
young company, it's not simple to get and see large companies and ask them 
for restricted secret information right away to implement our solutions 
more efficiently, especially since the company had no history. ;-)

In the ideal world, we would have chosen Intel and NVIDIA solutions. Yeah, 
probably another trojan horse you would say.

> What progress (toward freedom and extensibility) has happened since
> then?

Acceptable extensions for alternative codecs were proposed. They were 
positively received but not integrated since there is no implementation. 
We didn't see input from you though. You appear to know how to design an 
API suitable for any future codec the mankind could think of, your help 
would be much appreciated.

>  Gwenole, you recommended that we wait through 2009 for more
> secret stuff to get released; did that happen?

The GMA500 driver will remain closed source. The G45 driver is free. If 
you count the number of chips around, the G45 driver is to be considered 
the main driver available. i.e. the Intel IGP, even integrated to the CPU 
nowadays, is the dominant player now. And the VA-API driver for it is 
free.

Hopefully, the H.264 decoder would be released soon. The new target is 
expected to be Q2, this year. If this was that simple, this would already 
be available and even available to other chips, isn't it?