Hey all! Please let me clarify a few things before this gets out of hand.
The term "OLPC project members" from Ben's post: "But how can the answer then be for OLPC project members to recommend installation of a proprietary player that has MP3 and FLV codecs (and various others) built in?!" needs to be qualified. 1) OLPC Philippines is undergoing a sort of reboot/reorganization right now and Melch, MJ and I are relatively new members of OLPC Philippines. I just signed on around June when I first discovered that it existed and MJ & Melch mid-September when I made a shout out at Philippine Flash Actionscripters for volunteers to do XO Flash dev work. We'll make a shout out to the global flash & flash lite developer community once we're done with some preliminary tests in order to reduce the pain of adapting to a new platform by new non-Linux-using Flash developer volunteers. 2) We are not OLPC core members and do not speak for 1CC. We're just speaking from independent volunteer perspectives. 3) We just got the dev XO units 2-3 weeks ago and that's only how long I've started being active on OLPC dev. 4) I guess there hasn't been enough active participation from Flash developers on the OLPC before and so my project proposal to target the XO as a Flash Gamedev/Edu-gamedev platform got approved by the OLPC contributor/developer program. Judging from the state of the Wikis on laptop.org (official OLPC site) and googling around the internet, I guess there haven't been too many Flash developers who've gotten involved with the XO too :P > Why should we contribute to OLPC when OLPC has already agreed to using > Microsoft's software and apparently has no (moral) objections to using > Adobe's software? Actually, almost all OLPC developer members/volunteers choose to steer people towards using Gnash instead of Flash. As much as possible, the OLPC team wants Gnash to be targeted instead of Adobe Flash, and this has been very consistent in all the discussions I've had with active volunteers and team members so far. So yes, there are general objections to using Adobe software from the OLPC team & volunteers and a strong leaning towards the use of Gnash. It's just that with the line that was crossed when OLPC & MS partnered up, I guess the agreement that only FOSS be used with the XO is not there anymore. Me, having tested several flavors of Adobe Flash & Gnash on a few different OS builds of the XO in the short time I've had my hands on physical units, have only recently come to my *personal* preference to use Adobe's Flash player as my primary browser plugin for now because of the pain in trying to get sound in Gnash to work on XO's latest signed test OS build (767) (which will be the basis for the stable build 8.20 which will come shipped in the upcoming XO units that will ship in the new Give 1 Get 1 program that's going to run this November). Also, there's the issue of AS3/AVM2. Having done tests with a benchmarking app we made to test AS2 vs AS3 performance (both published for Flash 9, using nearly identical algorithms), the AVM2 (AS3) version definitely trumps the AVM1 (AS2)'s performance. And this is extremely relevant because we need to squeeze every bit of juice out of the XO's limited memory & CPU. > To me (again, as an outsider) it seems to me that OLPC has generated a > *huge* free software development momentum, and a massive amount of work > was completed in order to let a giant software stack run cleanly and > quickly on the OLPC. Now OLPC has decided to throw the majority of that > work out of the window (pun not intended) in favour of a proprietary > solution from a vendor that has apparently discovered a new part of > the world to enslave. Not really. All that work being thrown out the window is far from the reality. Despite the looming invasion of Windows XP on the XO, almost all of the dev work being done is still for Fedora-Sugar-XO and with a strong leaning towards FOSS projects. > To me, it seems like whatever work might be done to get Gnash working > nicely on the OLPC is going to be thrown away almost as soon as it > might potentially be finished. So, I ask, why contribute? Again, Gnash is the default (and therefore *preferred*) flash player that ships with the XO. OLPC, a group that enjoys mainstream media attention and openly espouses the use of Gnash, helps greatly in the advancement of Gnash's cause. As such, it would be really fantastic if some of you guys could also sit in at OLPC's developer mailing list at http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- Carlos Nazareno http://www.object404.com interactive media specialist zen graffiti studios [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Gnash-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev
