Gnash is an open source player for Adobe’s Flash format. It can be used as an alternative to Adobe’s proprietary player. The upcoming Ubuntu 7.10 release includes automatic installation of either Adobe Flash or Gnash. I decided to put this feature to the test in Ubuntu 7.10 Beta.

Gnash, the free software Flash player, has released its first beta. The new release is a milestone for both the project and the GNU/Linux desktop, which remains dependent on the proprietary Adobe player for handling Flash files (.swf).

"We just released an improved GNU Flash player, Gnash 0.8.8. Gnash plays SWF (Shockwave Flash) files compatible with the Adobe Flash player. Gnash is portable software released under the GNU GPLv3. It runs on GNU/Linux, embedded GNU + Linux systems, and BSD, including x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and 64-bit systems.

Announced early this morning was the release of Gnash 0.8.4, which is the third beta release for this Free Software Foundation sponsored project. Gnash aims to become a viable open-source Adobe Flash / SWF Player for Linux and related platforms.

Open Media Now! and the Gnash community are happy to announce the release of Gnash 0.8.9. Gnash the GNU Flash player is a free/libre SWF movie player, with all the source code released under GPLv3. Gnash is available as both a standalone player and also as a browser plugin for Firefox (and all other Gecko based browsers), Chromium and Konqueror.

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.

The third alpha release of Gnash has just been made at version
0.8.0. Gnash is a GPL'd Flash movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript2 classes.

Gnash is the Free Software Foundation’s alternative Adobe Flash player. Version 0.8 is the third alpha release, and frankly, it rocks! It is also one of the first projects to be covered by the GPLv3.

To make a long story short it's really hard to develop Gnash. basically the rules in the reverse engineering of Flash make it so that to work on the project you can never have used a version of Adobe flash for your own personal use to begin with.