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I found some information that implies that the Android version will be 4.4, and I think you can sideload Flash on Android devices, even though it's not supported by Adobe any more. (In fact, I just tried it, and it'll run on my Android 5.0 phone just fine)

For desktop Linux, I don't think that Adobe has ever released an ARM port of the plugin, so you'd be out-of-luck if you wanted to run a "real" OS, rather than a mobile one. Well, unless Gnash has gotten good enough to be usable for your purposes. It's been a number of years since I tried it, and it didn't impress me then.

AIR is another runtime for SWF files that uses their ECMAscript VM, yes. More likely it's a wrapper with some add-ons, but I digest.

Long term meaning how long? 3 years? 5? 10? 20? Even 5 years is a really really really long time in the computer industry, and if things get really bad, there's always Gnash http://gnashdev.org/ and Lightspark http://lightspark.github.com/, which are good starts that could use some more love.

With what Adobe's been doing and saying, I wouldn't expect them to completely abandon the platform within 5 years, but I can't read minds. See: PalmOS, or Adobe's recent out-of-left-field announcements that makes one wonder if a chimp is pulling the levers on the board of directors.

One could liken it to Oracle's JVM and the other not-quite-implementations. There is an end-of-the-world scenario where the project survives. It isn't pretty, but it could work. And if all else fails, be prepared to switch technologies. Which, again, in the computer industry, you should at least keep in the back of your mind. I keep my "plan for nuking the world and switching to SDL" from getting too dusty.

Is it a viable alternative against flash? According to http://gnashdev.org/ last version is 0.8.9 published in march 2011.

This is interesting:

Using Adobe Flash in developing Gnash in the EU

The question of exactly how legal it is to use Adobe Flash in the course of developing Gnash is a frequent topic on the Gnash mailing lists. Here I'll discuss the situation in the EU.

In this subject I'll avoid the term reverse engineering since it means different things to different people.

The relevant legislation in the EU is the Council Directive 91/250/EEC of 14 May 1991 on the legal protection of computer programs. Council directives are generally implemented also in national law, although the European Court of Justice has held that directives are binding on member states (i.e., EU countries) even if they have not (yet) added them into national law.

The relevant part of the directive is Article 5, paragraph 3:

The person having a right to use a copy of a computer program shall be entitled, without the authorization of the rightholder, to observe, study or test the functioning of the program in order to determine the ideas and principles which underlie any element of the program if he does so while performing any of the acts of loading, displaying, running, transmitting or storing the program which he is entitled to do.

In short, so long as you are allowed to use Adobe Flash, you can use it to observe and study to understand its behavior.

So first we must insure that we have the right to use Adobe Flash. This is easy, because usage of Adobe Flash is free under the Flash EULA.

Now the observant reader might point out that the EULA specifically prohibits using Adobe Flash in order to create a competing product (such as Gnash). However, the above-quoted article from the directive says that the study and observation may take place without the authorization of the rightholder. This means that Adobe cannot bindingly prohibit such activites in its licensing agreements.

bjacques's blog at gnashdev.org I don't know if you can explicitly forfeit a right by accepting a private agreement (the EULA) and then claim that it was never valid. AFAIK, most rights can be waived. Any European lawyers in the house?

Perhaps you [we] could donate to Gnash ? You know, they might get there someday.

even staying with Evil H.264, the video-tag/HTML5 is still a huge moral win over Evil Proprietary Flash.

I agree that using the video tag would be preferable to using Flash, at least for just an online movie player (ala YouTube), but I largely believe in taking a multi-pronged approach here.

First, there's a huge quantity of Flash content out there and people developing using Flash. Free Software enthusiasts can't even play that stuff unless they have some kind of tool, and that's why stuff like Gnash and Lightspark must be important parts of our overall roadmap.

For web video we need to start pushing the video tag in conjunction with free formats. Ogg Theora is one possibility, trying to get Google to open the vp8 codec for YouTube is another. I think that there's still a hope (small, but possible) to get widespread support for Ogg Theora alongside widespread support for H.264.

And of course there's the software patent front: We need to chug forward and get the courts (or legislature, if necessary) to get rid of software patents once and for all. Getting rid of software patents would make codec support possible for thing such as H.264, mp3, Sorenson Spark, and vp6, and would remove the threat of shakedowns from companies like Microsoft for things like the FAT patents.

We need to push forward on all of these fronts if we want to make real progress towards our twin goals of free and open formats on the web and the ability for FOSS browsers to implement all relevant technologies without fear of patent litigation.

...according to the article his code only supports the SWF 1.0 format, and he's currently working on adding support for the SWF 2.0 file format.

Adobe Flash 1 and Flash 2 (which I'm going to guess might roughly line up with SWF 1.0 and 2.0), were released in 1996 and 1997, respectively. As in, over a decade ago.

Much larger, more long-term projects like Gnash have been working on completing a compliant Flash client for several years and still don't have support through Flash 8, 9, and 10. It's apparently a lot of work to support all of the different pieces of Flash, especially as it turns out that the SWF spec has been completely overhauled several times over the past decade, resulting in wide differences between things like ActionScript 1, 2, and 3.

So while I wish this effort all the best, it would require a lot of time/energy/talent to make this client have the coverage necessary for, say, internet video sites to work.

What happens to all the folks (us?) who have been gloating over the security of our Macs, Linux, smartphones etc. when these apps get broken? Time to eat crow?

I would imagine that if Flash etc. became poor enough in terms of security we'd see more attention on projects like Gnash.

No joke. Even if they are absolutely equally secure, Gnash provides source code. You can build that source with SSP (or equivalent). You can also build it as PIC and apply many other restrictions with a PaX and/or Grsecurity kernel. All of these will reduce the chances that a known vulnerability will lead to a successful exploit. Specifically, a known vulnerability that would normally allow an attacker to run arbitrary code stands a good chance of merely crashing the application.

You just don't have options like this with binary blobs. I really would like to see more development of Gnash, as it seems that Adobe Flash is on a downhill course in terms of security and will continue to be a problem. Source code is about freedom and control. With such control, you can take steps to manage a risk even if you cannot perfectly mitigate it.

What happens to all the folks (us?) who have been gloating over the security of our Macs, Linux, smartphones etc. when these apps get broken? Time to eat crow?

I would imagine that if Flash etc. became poor enough in terms of security we'd see more attention on projects like Gnash.

Gnash anyone? gnashdev.org

Gnash is all fine and good, except that it's a piece of shit and doesn't work. Just like open-source Java.

What isn't working for you? Sure, Gnash doesn't work on every website yet, but the Gnash devs are working this summer on v9 and v10 support for popular websites.

Look, I like open source as much as the next guy (more, probably), but more than anything I like working software. Google can either spend lots of man-hours making Gnash work properly with all the Flash out there on the web today, and then spend more man-hours keeping it up-to-date as Adobe adds new features that various popular websites take advantage of, or they can just partner with Adobe and use real Flash, spending just a few man-hours to integrate it into their system.

Gnash is making large strides towards covering the feature set provided by the Adobe Flash Player. Rob Savoye (lead programmer for the project) has stated that Gnash has actually been ahead of Adobe in several areas, including first with 64bit support, first ARM support, lower CPU usage, and so forth. Gnash is improving much faster than Adobe Flash is introducing new features.

I think it would be worth Google's time to invest in Gnash at this point. Investing in Gnash would mean that they wouldn't be beholden to a company like Adobe, and it seems like one of the main reasons for having Chrome OS is so that Google can get out from under the control of another large company: Microsoft.

Shameless Plug: If you have some free time or money, please consider donating either one to the project.

If your package manager doesn't provide a build of Gnash for you, read the build instructions for your platform.

This has been asked before, but... where's the Linux version? And will we need a liquid cooled Phenom x4 processor to render the Adobe video in full screen?

If the dudes from Gnash were smart they would get on RTMP and release their version of the "hulu player". You can already run youtube videos outside of your browser.

OK WTF is that all about...

RTMP is the Real Time Messaging Protocol that Adobe has developed for streaming stuff over the Internet.

Red5 is a Free Software (LGPL) implementation of the RTMP.

Cygnal is the Gnash project's RTMP server (also Free Software).

Also see more docs on RTMP on the Gnash wiki, and RTMPE on this other wiki.

... and should I care?

Would you like to have control over the software that you run and use? Are you concerned about your software and/or hardware implementing things like the Broadcast Flag? Do you believe in Free Software because it gives you control over your computer?

If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, then you probably should care, as what's going on right now is making it difficult or impossible for you to run Free Software (or even to pick software) to interact with the RTMP protocol -- a protocol that a given website might require you to use to interact with their media content.

OK WTF is that all about...

RTMP is the Real Time Messaging Protocol that Adobe has developed for streaming stuff over the Internet.

Red5 is a Free Software (LGPL) implementation of the RTMP.

Cygnal is the Gnash project's RTMP server (also Free Software).

Also see more docs on RTMP on the Gnash wiki, and RTMPE on this other wiki.

... and should I care?

Would you like to have control over the software that you run and use? Are you concerned about your software and/or hardware implementing things like the Broadcast Flag? Do you believe in Free Software because it gives you control over your computer?

If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, then you probably should care, as what's going on right now is making it difficult or impossible for you to run Free Software (or even to pick software) to interact with the RTMP protocol -- a protocol that a given website might require you to use to interact with their media content.

OK WTF is that all about...

RTMP is the Real Time Messaging Protocol that Adobe has developed for streaming stuff over the Internet.

Red5 is a Free Software (LGPL) implementation of the RTMP.

Cygnal is the Gnash project's RTMP server (also Free Software).

Also see more docs on RTMP on the Gnash wiki, and RTMPE on this other wiki.

... and should I care?

Would you like to have control over the software that you run and use? Are you concerned about your software and/or hardware implementing things like the Broadcast Flag? Do you believe in Free Software because it gives you control over your computer?

If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, then you probably should care, as what's going on right now is making it difficult or impossible for you to run Free Software (or even to pick software) to interact with the RTMP protocol -- a protocol that a given website might require you to use to interact with their media content.

How about you take a second to know you're talking about before you talk about it?

Flash Player support for h.264 and The Gnash OSS Flash Player

Face it, Flash isn't as evil as you want it to be. And Microsoft has a hell of a way to go to catch up.

Shame about Flash though. That's not likely to ever be available on ARM Linux.

People seem to have forgotten about Gnash since Adobe made Flash 10 on Linux x86. According to this, Gnash code can be compiled on ARM

Gnash is hardly complete, though (they're still working on Flash 7 and 8 compatibility), and I guess development slowed down ever since Flash 10 came out, but once Linux on ARM gets more "geek-popular", it may get the attention it deserves.

Frankly I would love an ARM based notebook except for just a few issues.

1. Flash. Like it or not Flash is everywhere and I have not seen a Linux ARM version.

2. Java. I need it and JavaFX could be a nice alternative to Silverlight/Moonlight.

Both Gnash and OpenJDK are available for ARM.

Search on google for: gnash clean room

What you will find is that Adobe made it difficult to legally work on an open source viewer, and that the specs that exist are either (1) leaked, and therefore it is questionable whether you can legally use them, or (2) from a clean room reverse engineering.

From: http://lwn.net/Articles/270056/

Gnash development has been done using a Clean room reverse engineering technique. By agreeing to the license for the Adobe (formerly Shockwave) Flash player, a developer gives up the right to develop a competing product.

From: http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/30

Rob: The Adobe EULA for Flash forbids anyone who has installed their Flash tools or plugin from working on Flash technologies. This has had a chilling effect on the development of free Flash players, since a developer must either choose to decide that Adobe won't sue them over this, or to do what Gnash does, which is a slow and inefficient, clean room, reverse engineering project.

Adobe has declined to comment on this issue, since the confusion benefits their lockin of the market. Although Adobe has said they support Open Source projects, and donated Tamarin to Mozilla, we'd love to see a public statement that Gnash developers won't be subject to a lawsuit. It's very difficult to find developers that have never installed the Adobe software ever, which is what we've been doing to maintain our clean room approach.

From: http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/21

Savoye suggests that, "Most of this documentation, if we really wanted it, has already leaked out on the Internet years ago."

You're not "excluded," you are choosing not to use a de facto standard. Yes, there are de facto standards apart from the de jure ones. Life sucks. Get a helmet.

And to put more holes in your stupid, stupid whine, the Adobe SWF (Flash file) specification is available, no strings attached. (It's missing RTMP, but Gnash has reverse engineered it and published their findings.)

You mean Gnash? It already runs fine on the ARM processor. And PPC and MIPS, and *-64.

Nowadays, anyone who wants to discover a new operating system wants to try a live CD first.

Although there were other live OpenBSD CDs (like OliveBSD), yet another one, especially based upon something original like Enlightenment, is a great thing.

OpenBSD is often described as a server-only (or network-stuff-only) operating system. Actually, it can also be a decent desktop OS.

I'm using OpenBSD on my primary workstation for 7 years and I'm quite happy with it. The only thing I *really* miss, especially as a web developper, is the lack of Flash support (except crappy support with Opera). nspluginwrapper + linux emulation is still as stable as nitroglycerine.

Not to be an OSS whore, but check out the latest development sources for gnash. If definitely improved since the last time I've used it. I've also heard that some flash 9 apps are starting to load just fine, but what do I know.

bzr branch http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/gnash/trunk

If you can try it out tonight, reply to this because i'm curious on how it works out on OpenBSD

Gnash 0.8.4 was released yesterday, but I guess that doesn't merit a slashvertisement:

http://gnashdev.org/

Negative.

Gnash is based on GameSWF. Swfdec is based on...swfdec.

For why don't they work together ... they do. See this interview for more information.

There is two versions of Flash decoding libraries, one called Gnash and another called Swfdec. I still wonder why they don't work together, but hey, they are open source and both has kinda different visions how to deal with Flash proprietary stuff.

From http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/30 is a sorta answer:

LWN: Some LWN readers have complained that having two projects aimed at implementing Flash is divisive and wasteful. How would you respond to those readers?

Benjamin: The optimal number of projects for a given project space sounds like a good PhD thesis topic. Having multiple projects in a space, or multiple solutions to a problem is simply how things work in the community. Any non-trivial bug or project space has multiple solutions, and often one cannot determine which is the best solution until all have been tried. Also, people working on these projects are real people with real interests and complex motivations for working on particular projects. Simplifying it into "you currently work on A, so you'd instead like working on B in the same project space" is unrealistic. And IMO, divisiveness between similar projects often has more to do with fanboys than it has to do with developers, who obviously share interests and experiences.

There are already at least two applications that do this: swfdec and gnash.

http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/

http://www.gnashdev.org/

What about Swfdec or Gnash?

Gnash has been ported to Play Station 3 and the latest version starts being able to play video.

Cygnal is another project from the Gnash / OpenMediaNow team. Multi-channel video conferencing is the #1 goal right now. It should be ready for outside developers now. From their dev site http://wiki.gnashdev.org/Cygnal : "This is a Flash media server compatible audio and video server. It handles negotiating the copyright metadata exchange, as well as streaming the content. It will need to handle many thousands of simultaneous network connection, and support running on large GNU/Linux clusters. It should support handling multiple streams with differing content, as well as a multicast stream with a single data source. There are several other streaming servers that handle streaming audio and video. Some handle multiple formats, but most have a protocol supported only by that one project (like shoutcast). None but Red5 support Flash, and that feature isn't working yet anyway. Due to the patent issues surrounding MP3, and the fact that FLV and ON2 are closed formats, one of the main goals of this project is to support free codes and free protocols as the primary way of doing things. Optionally there will be support for MP3, FLV, and ON2 (VP6 and VP7) when playing existing Flash content. Both FLV and the VP6 & VP7 codecs are included in ffmpeg. Users can use the ffmpeg plugin for Gstreamer to use these proprietary codecs."

The EULA for the Flash player claims to forbid you from making your own implementation. This means that the Gnash project can't accept help from anyone who has installed Adobe's plugin. Whether click-through licences are legally binding is questionable, but in the end it doesn't matter whether they are binding or not, just whether they give an opportunity for lawyers to tie you up in long court cases, which is probably true.

Will Adobe be granting permission to work on Flash implementations to those who have installed their software? I didn't spot anything about that in their FAQ.

After a cursory glance, the [swf] specifications look pretty complete - they even give a sample "dissection" of a flash file, as well as a nice index of "opcodes" (tags) - should indeed be useful to the Gnash project.

The swf specifications do not seem to document ActionScript, however so it's not easy riding for the Gnash team (Gnash's ActionScript todo list)

I wonder if this document will give raise to any security vulnerabilities?

Meanwhile, the GNU implementation of SWF is GNASH, which just released a new version. GNASH is also not preinstalled, but it's in some ways superior to Adobe's Flash, while remaining compatible (with practically all features found in the wild, and adding the rest) - and free, including not adding DRM you don't want. And GNASH was announced to be part of the new KDE, so it will in fact be preinstalled on lots of Linux machines.

That's the first beta release after four alphas, correct? How "beta" is it?

AIR doesn't come preinstalled, so it's just another piece of software people can choose to use, not an existing platform to target with content.

Meanwhile, the GNU implementation of SWF is GNASH, which just released a new version. GNASH is also not preinstalled, but it's in some ways superior to Adobe's Flash, while remaining compatible (with practically all features found in the wild, and adding the rest) - and free, including not adding DRM you don't want. And GNASH was announced to be part of the new KDE, so it will in fact be preinstalled on lots of Linux machines.

Maybe you Linux users could go help out with Gnash development.

Or just keep on bitching and moaning, I guess. Whatever.

X64 is compatible with x86. Is there some issue I'm not aware of?

Actually MPEG-1 is not supported natively by IE or Firefox.

Quoth the headline: "that's the price to pay for depending on proprietary solutions..."

There are open source implementations of the Flash protocol; I'm running Gnash as my SWF player on Ubuntu 64, and it works just fine. Your mileage may vary.

Perhaps you should take a look at Gnash, the open source Flash player. Works for me.

i wonder if miguel "microsoft" de icaza and his cronies [1] are faster than the gnash [2] ppl.

also, this is not cross-platform. java would be. any free software could be ported.
flash is proprietary evil and places everyone who wants to see BBC content at adobes will.
it's a bit like "IA64 ? sorry, but no.".

with free software, this wouldn't happen.

[1] http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight
[2] http://www.gnashdev.org/

Then you'll find the inclusion of Gnash in Ubuntu Gutsy quite welcome. It already supports quite a few websites and far more platforms than Flash Player does.

With Java now GPLed, my own problem plugin is Adobe Shockwave. I still occasionally run into things that require it, and there's still no native Linux plugin! Adobe haven't even bothered with an Intel Mac version.

With Gnash now supporting YouTube, and Silverlight on the horizon, Adobe Flash is under serious threat of becoming irrelevant. Frankly, I want to see that day happen. It may finally spur Adobe to try and get the support of the users by giving us proper 64-bit support or (God forbid) just open-sourcing Flash.

• Gnash - (project development page)
  an open-source project which develops a Flashplayer which can be run stand-alone, be swallowed inside web browser using appropriate plug-ins, or integrated in bigger project using extensions. Supports OpenGL and Cairo as hardware accelerated renderer. Also, has an option not to auto-start playing the flash crapnimations.
• SWFDec
  an open-source library for decoding flash, which also comes with a browser plugin.

and TFA has a Flash ad...

Or you could just wait a few weeks for the next version of gnash to come out, which uses libavcodec/ffmpeg to decode flash video on sites like YouTube.

The aim should be to continue the move away from binary blobs from Adobe, Nvidia, etc... and not embrace them as a solution to all compatibility problems. If they don't want to play nice, it is their own problem. Consumers can just choose some hardware that is made by a company that has better values (or use a reverse engineered open source driver for it).

Hopefully by the time this starts happening Gnash will be at a usable point.