On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 22:51, Richard Fairhurst <rich...@systemed.net> wrote: > Aevar Arnfjorth Bjarmason wrote: >> Making their player open source would be nice. But what's mainly >> stopping players like Gnash is that their protocols are closed > > The SWF and RTMP formats are published. The codecs aren't, but that's > the whole Ogg Theora/H264 argument for HTML5 and Firefox so not at all > exclusive to Flash. And unless your translation code is cleverer than I > thought, they're irrelevant to Potlatch (which is kinda the reason I > posted here).
At least in 2009 the state of those specs was that they were unusable for the Gnash project, see e.g.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3s-mG5yUjY#t=31m30s "they released the specs, but the licensing agreement forbids you from using the specification to write your own implementation". Maybe that's changed since then. > The main thing stopping Gnash from supporting AVM2 (and strk can correct > me if I'm wrong) is that it's a whole big lot of work and there's > largely only one developer working on it - even though he's basically a > genius and Potlatch 1 would never have happened without his work on > Ming. If you threw 100 programmers at Gnash for three months then you'd > have an open source (non-audio/video) AVM2 player. I think you need to read The Mythical Man-Month :) > strk shouldn't have to spend his time rewriting code that Adobe has > already written. Sun made Java open-source. Flash is a direct parallel. > I would encourage people not to get hung up on codecs (because Flash has > already lost the video battle, all video will be HTML5 in two years) and > encourage Adobe to Do The Right Thing, for the benefit of apps like > Potlatch and a million others. Adobe has explicitly said in the past that they can't open source it because they've used a lot of parts in in that they've licensed from somewhere else. Anyway. Good luck with the petition. Personally I think it's about as likely to succeed as an equivalent petition asking Microsoft to open source Windows. I'd love to be proven wrong, though. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
