Re: [Gplflash-devel] Press request: NewsForge

[Tomas G. <tom...@ya...>]

Hi,

Here is some answers for your questions:

TG = Tomas Groth ("reviver" of gplflash1, and part of the gplflash2-devel-team)
CC = Christophe Choquet ("father" of gplflash2, and it's main author)

> 1. Why revive GPLFlash after five years of dormancy? Did the Free Software 
> Foundation and/or Richard Stallman's influence have anything to do with it?

TG: The reason i revived gplflash was mostly because i needed a flash
browser-plugin for an ibook with linux, and because i wanted to get some
"re-life" programming experience, besides the stuff i do at university (I'm
studing Computer Science in Copenhagen). FSF and RMS didn't have any direct
influence on me reviving it, except perhaps inspirering me to publish the
modified code, so that others could use and modify the code. But if
macromedia had made the flashplugin for more platforms, i probably never would
have heard about gplflash... I think this is the case for most (but not all)
gplflash-devels.

> 2. Will the old GPLFlash be dropped in favor of a complete from-scratch 
> replacement? How difficult will this be?

TG: Yes, gplflash1 will be dropped in favour of gplflash2, see this original
mail by Christophe:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=6191533&forum_id=43270
We'll probably still do some small fixes on gplflash1, but it's design is not
good for playing newer flashanimations... 
The gplflash2 implementation will be difficult, but Christophe has already
done a lot great coding, and it's coming along nicely, but still has a long way
to go. The reel difficult thing will be too make it feature complete, since
especially the actionscripts is quite extensive.

> 3. Has Macromedia contributed anything to GPLFlash? Do they know you're 
> working on this? On the other end of the spectrum, have they tried to stop
the 
> GPLFlash project?

CC:
MM has done nothing actively to either support or stop us yet. The swf format
and the actionscripts specifications are available on the web. I don't think
they have any interest in stopping us, since we actually help spread their
animation-format to more platforms.

>4. Have you decided on the license? I saw a discussion on GPL vs. LGPL.

TG: The libs in gplflash2 (which does all the work) will be LGPL, while the
plugin and player will be GPL.

> 5. If the new GPLFlash is a success in its rendering capabilities, how hard 
> would it be, in theory, to write a functional replacement for the Macromedia 
> Flash development environment?

TG: That's a completely different area as I see it, though gplflash could be
used as render-engine in such an enviroment. Looking at current OSS swf-creator
projects such as ming (http://ming.sourceforge.net/) and sswf
(http://sswf.sourceforge.net/) there is still (a lot of) work to do. but it's
not on gplflash's todo list.

Answers by:

Tomas Groth (tomasgroth at yahoo dot dk)
Christophe Choquet (christophe dot choquet2 at free dot fr)