The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced earlier this month the addition of Gnash, a new open source Flash movie player and Firefox plugin, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). “Open source” indicates that developers can build on top of earlier software to add features or tweak the old ones.
And that means maybe when you have 20 tabs open in Firefox displaying Flash websites, some smart coder can make it lean enough to keep your computer from eating itself.
Until the forthcoming release of Gnash, all flash movies were playable only by proprietary software like the widely-used Adobe Macromedia Flash player. While the Macromedia player is free, developers are restricted under copyright from modifying it.
FSF also says that while there are other free Flash (SWF format) players out there, none support newer than v4 versions. Gnash is based on GameSWF and supports many SWF v7 features.
Gnash runs as a standalone application, supports an XML-based message system as is documented in the Flash Format specification, and uses OpenGL for rendering the graphics.
Rob Savoye Wants You
The maintainer Gnash is developer Rob Savoye says that Gnash is playing more movies than any of the other free players, but needs more development support to improve its performance.
“All ActionScript classes exist and work, but not all the methods of each class are fully implemented,” he said. “With a few more developers, it could be reasonably complete in a few months.”
The FSF, who owns the copyright, is reviewing the GPL and has listed Gnash as a top-six priority project. Savoye maintains that he is a clean developer and has not reverse-engineered code from Adobe’s free product, developing Gnash from SWF format or Flash documentation on the Internet.
The home page of the project is at http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/. The Gnash development sources are accessible via anonymous CVS from Savannah. Gnash development is being funded by PubSoft.
