Re: [Gnash-dev] swfdec / gnash hacking competition

[Rob Savoye]

John Gilmore wrote:
> Benjamin Otte, the guy who picked up swfdec and has been hacking it
> since September, says he's got youtube working with it now:
> 
>   http://www.advogato.org/person/company/diary.html?start=34

  Yep, we saw him mention it on #gnash. We all spend alot of time
talking about Flash internals. He's very happy. We're happy too, because
of the discussions of how swfdec and Gnash are implemented, we're
learning things from each other's experiences.

> Here's why he didn't choose to hack on gnash instead: "Gnash is low
> quality, written in C++ with Boost, requires Copyright assignment, svn
> doesn't even compile and it does less than my current Swfdec, so I
> didn't hack on it."  Hmm, swfdec is LGPL, but he doesn't want to
> assign his copyright to FSF?  Not sure what his concern is.

  Many people dislike the GPL as being for fanatics, and dislike even
more assigning their copyright to the FSF. I don't want to sound like
I'm insulting swfdec, I think it's good there are multiple open source
flash players. But swfdec is tweaked to handle primarily YouTube, Gnash
handles many more Flash movies correctly. It's a difference in focus.

  Besides which, I think it's traditional to claim somebody's code sucks
when you really just want to do your thing your own way. :-)

        - rob -