>>> Generally speaking free software development has often less resources, so it's easier for a content producer to be friendly with free software that the other way around. >>>
Strk, I think that sums up the problem here. Sorry if it sounds harsh, but what you're expecting is not realistic: you're almost asking developers to lower the bar to accommodate to a product basically out of pity. It’s not a sustainable model. I don’t know much about non-Adobe players, honestly, but I do believe it’s impressive what the Gnash guys have achieved so far. I mean it. But, at best, such a project just has a distant chance to keep up with the official player. And that chance is rather remote as anyone can see. There are many reasons for that, but a few ones that come to mind are: 1) It’s obviously extremely hard to keep up with a big corporation that not only has enormous resources to invest, but also sets the standard and leads the development of that software. By definition, that means anyone trying to make a clone open source player will have to struggle just not fall behind too much. You’ll always be following other’s steps. 2) The motivation for a free flash player is rather mild. You already have the official player for free. True, it’s not entirely open source, but some parts of it are (Tamarin), reportedly works better than any other player in Linux and certainly in other platforms (Windows and Mac). Compare it with Mono, for instance. I personally think .NET is great, and if you want to run .NET apps in any platform other than Windows, well, you don’t have an official runtime. So Mono makes sense if you’re running Linux (or even Mac) and you want to use .NET. Note, too, that even though Mono is funded by Novell and is lead by a very talented and known OS engineer, they have managed to implement .NET 2.0 and some features of 3.5, not the complete runtime (again, because it’s damn hard to keep up). Nevertheless, that project has better chances altogether, because it has way more resources, and there’s a stronger motivation for it. Also note that almost nobody installs Mono on Windows – apart from MS .NET not being open source, why would you use Mono instead if you have MS runtime already available for free? About MS Word / OpenOffice, again, that’s a different scenario. Word is not only a tool to produce content but also a viewer/player; it’s both things. So, if you don’t have Word and you didn’t have OpenOffice and someone gives you a .doc file, you’re pretty much screwed (maybe MS has some “viewer” for docs, not sure, but even if it does, most people are not aware of it). OpenOffice definitely solves a problem for many people who can’t or don’t want to use MS’s product. I think there lies the reason why projects like MTASC, FlashDevelop, Haxe, etc, have had success. Because, if you want to produce content for the flash player, those are great and free tools (both in “free as in freedom of speech” and “free as in free beer” sense). People use them not mainly because you can tweak them if you want, but because they’re great (in many aspects, even better than their official counterparts) and they’re usable for real work today. They are competitive and suit lots of developers’s needs nicely. So, again, this may sound hard, but if you’re trying to make or clone a platform, and you want to be realistic about it, you should be the one supporting that platform’s features, rather than asking other people to lower the bar to support you. You should accommodate to your users, not ask your users to accommodate to you. Expecting things to be the other way round is not futile, in my opinion. Cheers Juan Pablo Califano 2009/3/27 strk <[email protected]> > On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 03:10:07PM +0100, Stefano Sabatini wrote: > > > which kind of problems make gnash/$your_preferred_free_flash_player > > not able to support AS3 (I mean lack of specifications, licensing > > issues, technical, whatever)? > > Development effort at this stage (time, money). > > Generally speaking free software development has often > less resources, so it's easier for a content producer to > be friendly with free software that the other way around. > > Just think .doc files. It's kind of easy nowadays to read > them (thanks openoffice) but a few years ago wasn't it damn > stupid to have to fight with .doc files containing *very* > simple text only information ? (still is stupid, just less > proving). > > You can do wonderful things even with an SWF4, ever seen > the orisinal games [1] ? > > [1] http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/. > > --strk; > > Free GIS & Flash consultant/developer () ASCII Ribbon Campaign > http://foo.keybit.net/~strk/services.html /\ Keep it simple! > > _______________________________________________ > osflash mailing list > [email protected] > http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org >
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