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Lightspark 0.4.2 Open Source Flash Player Released
suraj.sun writes "The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark developer Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is 'designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hopefully) future hardware.'
The latest release of Lightspark features better compatibility with YouTube videos, sound synchronization support and the ability to use fontconfig for font selection. Other changes include plug-in support for Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser and support for Firefox's out of process plug-in (OOPP) mode, which was added in version 3.6.4 of the browser."
At least link to the project page rather than a rehashed "news" story: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/lightspark
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It won't, however, answer Apple's biggest reason for not wanting to support Flash.
Flash is, simply, a proprietary format that they don't have any patent control over. They want h264, which is a proprietary format controlled by a consortium they are a major member of.
Apple wants Flash dead. They don't want it open, they don't want it closed, they don't want it with cherries and whipped cream on top. They want it dead. It's something they cannot control, and therefore it must die.
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Gnash does not support version two of the Actionscript Virtual Machine. (Most new Flash content uses that AVM version.) Lightspark is intended to support exactly that. There are many other differences, but that's the main one.
The good news: it's an open-source Flash player
The bad news: for better compatibility with web browsers, it's written in Flash
The irony is that if open source people didn't have a target to emulate, there's tons of things that would have never been written since a baseline and mindshare in the overall tech market wouldn't have existed:
lex = flex
yacc = bison
sh = bash
UNIX = LINUX
vi = vim
To name just a few.
So your complaint about "proprietary" falls on deaf ears. If nothing else, what you call proprietary seeds things.
I seem to remember that the real problem Flash clones is that documentation is not completely free and if you read it you have to be under strong NDA for the rest of your life. This should also be why Gnash always lags behind. How did he overcome this issue? Or are we waiting for a lawsuit to strike as soon as the plugin becomes usable?
The creator of the project trained a chimpansee to understand code, a literal code-monkey if you will or rather a code-ape to be more accurate. This code-ape then reads the Flash documentation and explains it with sign language to the project creator. Since the code-ape cannot be properly held to an NDA the project continues unencumbered by draconian laws or demonic contracts.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
They want h264, which is a proprietary format controlled by a consortium they are a major member of.
I'm not sure what you mean by "major" but Apple only has 1 patent in the h264 patent pool that looks like nothing but a placeholder patent to satisfy the membership requirement.
i386 protected mode OS
ext2/3
emacs
Perl, Python and others
decss
bayesian spam filtering
eclipse
To name a few more. Proprietary is not necessarily first, just the first to try and make profit from the project.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
Apple's browser engine? How many times does this myth have to be corrected? KHTML was a pretty complete rendering engine before Apple adopted it under the name WebKit. It was the only major free software contender to gecko, and Apple was not the first to notice it. NOKIA used it to replace gecko in their handhelds (and they sent a nice thank you letter to the khtml mailing list). Yes, Apple did contribute a lot of code, but they did not write it. And as of now, they are not the only contributors either. So webkit is a bad example for Apple's contributions - they basically forked KHTML (and the first few releases of Safari were pretty much KHTML + a few patches) and they had no choice but to maintain it as free software because KHTML was GPL.