[Sugar-devel] Flash at Sugar Labs

[Rob Savoye]

David Farning wrote:

> Fourth, the Standards -
> Flash deliverables come in two formats .swf and .flv.  Swf and
> ActionScript, the development language use to create .swfs have been
> open sourced.  I believe that the ActionScript source code is jointly
> held by Adobe and Mozilla.  There are possible legal questions about
> the patent encumberment status of some of the media codecs used in
> swfs and flvs.  We would need clarification from the Software Freedom
> Conservancy on these issues.

  We wrote our own ActionScript library, and now the specifications are
freely available. We haven't implemented a complete AS library, that's a
huge project we haven't had the resources for. We have implemented most
of the AS classes that actually get used, and have been working on AS 3
support as well. FLV is not patented, but it uses sorenson for
compression, which is patented. Gnash supports Theora streaming to get
around this, although I think only the Internet Archive is doing this.

> So, counting backwards how does this affect Sugar Lab?
> Fourth, the Standards -
> We need to wait for feedback from the SFC and Open Media Now.

  Already talked to the SFLC on the issues, the main legal issue is
basically the codecs, SWF itself has never been patented. I've met with
 EFF lawyers too about reverse engineering issue,and we're good there.
But flash movies use MP3 as the codec for sounds in animations. While
Gnash does support the streaming of vorbis or theora, there so far
aren't any creation tools that will let you use vorbis for sound effects
yet. We'd love to add this to our swf creation tool, Ming, one of these
days...

> Third, the authoring tools -
> Adobe has done a very effective job eliminating the competition for
> flash authoring tools.  http://osflash.org/ has a number of open
> source development tools.  I am not enough of a flash developer to
> judge if the authoring products are mature enough to be useful or not.
>  Are there any Flash developers out there, can you judge the quality
> of some of these products?

  None of the free flash authoring tools have a GUI. We support the Ming
project, then there is mtasc (as2, v8 only), and haxe. We've tried to
raise funding to put a GUI on top of any of these swf compilers, but
nobody seems that interested. The existing free authoring tools I've
seen don't even generate swf yet, they're bare prototypes. I've wondered
about a SWF backend for etoys though...

> Second, the player -
> The Free Software Foundation has flash player project called Gnash.
> The project is makin slow yet steady progress towards being a fully
> capable swf player.  The project suffers from lack of support.  Many
> Open Source users either download the Adobe player or forgo using
> flash.  The itch factor is pretty low.

  Yep. We get little support, as at the slightest problem, people just
install Adobe, and nobody sticks to Gnash unless they're a free software
fan. That and although we make good progress for a small team, many
distributions (OLPC included) have a bad tendency to stick to old, out
of date versions.

> There was a steady decrease in the availability and usability of sites
> with Xo and Gnash.  We need to wait for feedback from Gnash about the
> product's technical limitations and the project's development
> limitations.

  We suffer mostly from lack of resources, even when we had some funding
for the core team. There is just so much a handful of volunteer
developers can do... and reverse engineering is often slow and tedious.

> Finally, the brand -
> Adobe has recently asked Gnash to call their player a SWF player
> rather than a flash player:)

  Actually Adobe asked Canonical to call it a swf player, they've never
talked to us about it directly. As they said then, swf is the name of a
format that gets played, flash is the trademarked term of the creation
tools itself.

	- rob -