I'd like to ask this question that interests me: how do the Gnash developers know what to implement?
Several people have already written tools to generate flash and compile actionscript, so a lot of the knowledge about formats and methods is out there, as well as the knowledge in the Flash authors' community about the logical concepts behind the execution of a Flash movie. Once your implementation is able to run a small subset of SWF, you use the free tools to generate test cases to see whether your player does what it should, and eventually get up to playing real flash movies from the web of varying age and complexity to see whether Gnash does something reasonable with them. When you get bad output you disassemble the flash movie to see what it is trying to do, and implement that, and if you can't figure out what a movie's "supposed" to do, you get a friend to run a movie and send you some screenshots. Why, how would *you* do it?
And naturally the Flash licence forbids reverse-engineering.
We have taken professional legal counsel, and the term in the player EULA (and I presume also in the authoring environment) turns out to be illegal in the EU and unenforceable in the US. In practice, even a US lawsuit that is sure to fail, would *still* be a waste of time and patience for whoever they decided to pick out and flog publicly, so we prefer not to have anything to do with Adobe's stuff directly. Mind you, going through the courts with the EFF doing your legal defence for you could be an interesting experience if you've nothing better to do with your time, and would confer high-profile free software victim/hero status for life :) M _______________________________________________ Gnash-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev
