Re: [Gnash-dev] How do the Gnash developers know what to implement?

[Martin Guy]

> I'd like to ask this question that interests me: how do the Gnash
> developers know what to implement?

Several people have already written tools to generate flash and
compile actionscript, so a lot of the knowledge about formats and
methods is out there, as well as the knowledge in the Flash authors'
community about the logical concepts behind the execution of a Flash
movie.

Once your implementation is able to run a small subset of SWF, you use
the free tools to generate test cases to see whether your player does
what it should, and eventually get up to playing real flash movies
from the web of varying age and complexity to see whether Gnash does
something reasonable with them. When you get bad output you
disassemble the flash movie to see what it is trying to do, and
implement that, and if you can't figure out what a movie's "supposed"
to do, you get a friend to run a movie and send you some screenshots.

Why, how would *you* do it?

> And naturally the Flash licence forbids reverse-engineering.

We have taken professional legal counsel, and the term in the player
EULA (and I presume also in the authoring environment) turns out to be
illegal in the EU and unenforceable in the US.
 In practice, even a US lawsuit that is sure to fail, would *still*
be a waste of time and patience for whoever they decided to pick out
and flog publicly, so we prefer not to have anything to do with
Adobe's stuff directly. Mind you, going through the courts with the
EFF doing your legal defence for you could be an interesting
experience if you've nothing better to do with your time, and would
confer high-profile free software victim/hero status for life :)

   M