Around the time of the release of Ubuntu 7.10, I tried out the Gnash Flash player included in that release. Because Adobe’s Flash player can not be redistributed in the default Ubuntu installation, a choice of players are offered when you visit a page in Firefox with Flash content. There are three options in Ubuntu 8.04: Adobe Flash, Swfdec (new to this version), and Gnash.
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Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanSince the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselI read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
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Pity about Swfdec and Gnash
The two projects seem to be focused at the same goal, but stay separate because of licence incompatibility. Gnash is GPLed and so can use code from the LGPLed Swfdec, but it doesn't work in reverse. It would almost certainly be for the best if the two projects merged, but I get the feeling there'd be a lot of disagreement from the developers on whether the resulting project should be under the GPL or the LGPL.
There's a similar situation with OpenOffice.org (LGPL) and NeoOffice (GPL, derived from OpenOffice.org), and we may even end up seeing a similar one-way licence incompatibility with the OpenSolaris (CDDL now, possibly CDDL+GPLv3 in the future) and Linux (GPLv2 now, possibly GPLv2+3 or GPLv3 in the future) kernels.