Hi, There was a discussion on the FSFE-UK list today complaining about how Gnash was unstrategic for the free software movement and SVG+ECMAscript would be better. Which is nonsense, of course. Perhaps this list will find my post interesting, and I hope you all can tell me if I'm mistaken on anything :-)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dave Crossland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 7 Jan 2008 17:52 Subject: Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC's DRM Iplayer windows only To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On 07/01/2008, Noah Slater <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 05:08:11PM +0000, Dave Crossland wrote: > > Please show me the URL that disproves me that you seem to be aware of :-) > > Meh, I'm happy to argue in ignorance of the facts. ;) When Adobe was betting on SVG as a Flash killer, it could have been. That Adobe bought Macromedia was IMO chiefly for Flash; which demonstrates to me that it would have been more expensive for Adobe to develop SVG into Flash killer than buy Flash. The limited resources of the free software movement are therefore better spend on making a free Flash runtime and developer tools. Gnash is sponsoring Ming, lets not forget, which will underlie content creation tools, Flame being the first example since Macromedia Captivate is a small subset of Flash focused on a useful purpose. PDF was controlled by Adobe and recently became an ISO standard. MS-DOC was so bad that ODF became an ISO standard instead, and MS is now fighting that tooth and nail. Flash is a technically sound multimedia platform. Adobe has said that it tightly controls Flash runtimes for the same reason Sun kept a grip on Java runtimes: because "works the same on all runtimes" is compelling. Given that there are several Flash runtimes in development as free software, and given that the are free and run nicely on GNU+Linux they will be appearing in many embedded computers in 2009, it would make sense for Adobe to make Flash a "open" standard at ISO or similar, so that all clients can work towards ISO compliance and the "write many run many" apocalypse is avoided. If the don't, perhaps Gnash will become a "defacto" Flash standard, and not the Adobe runtime, because freedom matters to embedded hardware vendors who together (and certainly some on their own) dwarf Adobe in the total economy. -- Regards, Dave _______________________________________________ Gnash mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash
