The disconnect is wide and boggling

[elfs]

I am boggled.

Most people don't know this, but Adobe Flash is a published specification. Anyone who wants to can implement a Flash interpreter. And while there have been several attempts to do so-- most notably Gnash, the GNU Flash Interpreter-- most of them fall short. Adobe has a lot of good engineers, a lot of money, and has the advantage of seeing the next rev of the standard months before the rest of us.

So it is beyond mind-scroggling to discover that someone has written an open-source implementation of Flash... in Javascript.

Gurk.

Comments

Impressive

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe this is the way around not having an implementation of Adobe Flash player on the iPhone?

-Justin Akehurst

[dossy.livejournal.com]

... and you didn't even make mention of the most AWESOME EPIC WIN of a name that Tobey chose: Gordon. ("Aaah-ah! Saviour of the universe ...")

EULA

[ephemient.livejournal.com]

Until recently (just last year), the SWF and FLV File Format Specification License Agreement (http://web.archive.org/*/http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/fileformat/license/) stated

3. Restrictions

a. You may not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders SWF files.

All the Flash re-implementation projects I know of (Gameswf, Swfdec, Gnash, etc.) started off by reverse-engineering the SWF format rather than be tainted by Macromedia/Adobe's (at the time, also incomplete) documentation.

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

This does not surprise me. I finally installed Linux on a ThinkPad 600 a couple of months ago. Most of it went very well. Even wifi was a piece of cake, as I had a well supported adapter. I have no audio. It is not because there is not the right driver for ALSA, Crystal Labs gave Debian every thing they needed, and Debian used to fully support my sound chip. No, some putz decided to split hairs on licensing, and pulled support until Crystal gives them the license they want.