[osflash] comments on oss authoring vs rendering?

[Matthew Houliston]

On 03/06/2005 23:37, John Dowdell wrote:

> The core issue seems to me right now to be 
> "I want to know what's on my own machine" vs "I want to know what's on 
> everybody else's machines". But I'm not sure how sound my current 
> understanding seems to other people.

John, it's great to know you're watching this list.

Sounds right, but I'd like to offer a third core issue:
"I wonder if I can hack what's on my machine to make it do X a bit 
quicker, then upload my changes so everybody else's machine can benefit".

These three aspirations are not mutually exclusive.


> How do you feel about OSS authoring (which you can install on your own 
> machine) versus OSS plugins (where you rely on an unknown choice by each 
> audience member)? 

I like OSS authoring tools because they give me wider possibilities. I 
don't think anyone likes the idea of an "unknown" forked plugin, it 
sounds too much like another browser war. However, I *love* the idea of 
letting an army of OSS developers loose on existing Flash player source 
code. I believe we'd get a faster, smaller, more widely compatible 
player at the end of it.

I doubt the GLPFlash guys are going to stop until there's an OSS Flash 
player, theirs or yours, forking or no forking. Now would be a great 
time for MM to open its player source code but retain the central 
release point, à la Firefox/Apache/MySQL. These products are open source 
yet don't seem to become "unknown choices". Maybe the analogy is unfair, 
but I can't recall having had to write separate CSS stylesheets to fit 
each individual Firefox hacker's preference.

Retaining the release point means you'd retain veto, so all our code 
should still work. Opening the source code means you'd end up with a 
group of GPLFlash coders improving your player for free, and our clients 
would get an even faster/better/smaller plugin. Add auto-update, and 
everything's peachy...


> Do you see a difference between the OSFlash.org and 
> GPLFlash2 projects...?

My understanding was that GPLFlash2 is a Flash playback engine, while 
OSFlash.org is a wiki aiming to provide a central point of reference for 
the various open source flash-related projects out there. Did I miss 
something? Or were you perhaps referring to the still-unfinished FCS 
draft letter?
(http://osflash.org/doku.php?id=open_letter_to_macromedia_regarding_rtmp_draft)