Getting Flash to work with free software?

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

One of the problems reported by schools here in Norway, is the lack of
proper Flash support in the browsers included in Debian Edu.  There
are several free implementations, but none of these are good enough to
handle all flash applications.  I'm aware of these free
implementations of Flash:

  SWFdec - LGPL Flash Rendering library
    <URL:http://www.schleef.org/swfdec/>

    Seem to be actively developed, but progress is slow.  Last release
    0.3.2 as 2004-11-17.

  GPL Flash
    <URL:http://www.swift-tools.net/Flash/>

    Development seem to have stopped.  Version 0.4.0 was last changed
    2000-06-12.

  Tubesock GTK/GNOME swf player
    <URL:http://tubesock.sourceforge.net/>

    Incomplete implementation.  Development seem to have stopped, and
    last status update was 2002-07-28.

Part of the problem for these Flash players is that the specification
for flash isn't public, and to get access to the specification one
need to accept the license terms available from
<URL:http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/open/licensing/fileformat/license2.html>.
These terms are unacceptable to most free software developers, and
thus are unavailable for those implementing a free Flash viewer.

The result is that free flash viewers need to be implemented using
reverse engineering, and this is a lot of work.  But as the grunt work
already is done (swf-player _is_ working), I believe it should be
possible to get most of the existing flash applications working with
the free flash implementations.  The SWFdec package seem to have
gotten furthest, so I suggest we focus on that one.

We need to do two things to make this happen:

 - Test all flash applications using the swf-player in Debian/unstable
   and report any problems into Debian BTS.  This increases the amount
   of test cases available to the swfdec developers.

 - Get involved in the development of swfdec.  Debug problems, submit
   patches, help them review bug reports and verify if the problem
   reported still exist or not.  Contribute on the mailing lists, and
   talk to the developers on their IRC channel.

 - Raise the awareness for this issue.  Tell other people how to
   contribute, and explain why flash is important.

In addition to working on improving the free software Flash support,
we should also explain to the sites using flash that they are using a
system based on a non-public standard, and this making it harder for
free software to compete on equal terms as the non-free software.