Patrice Dumas wrote:
The support for flash in free software exists, but is still not at
the
level of proprietarysupport.
Indeed, Gnash doesn't support the latest ActionScript spec which most new
stuff is written in (especially when people are trying to actually use Flash
for programming as opposed to simple animations), and it also has this
tendency to crash all the time. :-( Other implementations are not any
better. There's Lightspark, but AFAIK it's still incomplete and it will
likely never be in Fedora because it has a hard dependency on FFmpeg (it
uses FFmpeg directly).
I don't use the proprietary Flash, but that means a lot of Flash stuff just
doesn't work on my machines.
I STRONGLY RECOMMEND AGAINST using Flash as a platform for Free Software
development. You'll be tempted to rely on features which are only in the
proprietary implementation (in fact, if you don't test with Free
implementations from day one, your stuff is very likely to rely on such
features!), making your software effectively non-Free! See also:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html
(the example of Java is no longer current, but the point of the article
still stands, and much of it applies 1:1 now after s/Java/Flash/g).
I still haven't understood what formats are similar with swf, and
better
supported by open source, maybe svg + WebM?
Actual PROGRAMMING languages as opposed to some ugliness which parasites the
web browser? Free Software developers should write their app in a real
language, such as C++ (Qt provides powerful support for graphics and
animations, for example) or one of the bazillion other languages Fedora
packages are written in.
Kevin Kofler