[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Re: Re: Scratchbox is not an emulator

[From: Andrew Barr]

On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 21:11 +0100, Ross Burton wrote:

> I seriously doubt that a Free Flash will match the official Flash for
> some time, but that is another story.  The blog for the Linux port of
> Flash is very interesting: http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/.  One of
> the recent posts talks about the Flash rendering model and how it's
> impossible (well, near impossible) to use Cairo to implement the Flash
> rendering model: it has to be implemented from scratch, including all of
> the weird bugs from old versions that are relied upon in large amounts
> of content.

Are you talking about Gnash?[1] It's in OpenGL (they were/are
experimenting with Cairo) and based off of the public-domain GameSWF
project which already does all of SWF v7 and most of ActionScript. It is
also actively developed with lots of commits occurring every day. Surely
you can't be talking about Gnash... :)

That penguin.swf blog is only mildly interesting, though. Cairo (do they
mean XRender too or just Cairo?) might not work but if you've ever used
the Linux Flash player on anything but cutting-edge hardware you know
they need to use some kind of graphics acceleration. It's amazing it
works as good as it does. 

Combining the quality of their Linux player that we have now and some of
the posts I've read there I'm not too hopeful for an improved Linux
Flash experience until Gnash starts working better. Not that I want to
see 99% of the Flash content out there anyway...

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

> The same argument is that Wine will give Windows a run for it's money.
> The devil is in the details.

Not really, because Wine implements the Win32 userland (and quite a lot
of it too, check out their progress pages) and nothing (well, almost
nothing) from the NT kernel space. Their goal is to run Windows apps on
Linux, and at that they do an amazingly good job given the differences
between Windows and X11, and if you consider that Win32 was never
designed to be cross-platform. They don't care about Windows drivers and
such so they aren't really trying to give Windows a "run for it's
money".

But this is off topic...

> I can say for sure that the addressbook application in IT2006 is closed
> source, 

Why? It doesn't make sense.

> although the backend is open source (it's Evolution Data Server,
> LGPL).  For the rest of the user-level applications its a mixed bag as
> far as I know: some are open source as they are derived from existing
> open source software, and some are closed.

It is not as if the community and/or a competing hardware manufacturer
couldn't replace these apps relatively easily. That's why I don't
understand the reasoning behind withholding their source code.

This competing hardware manufacturer nonsense needs to go, BTW. Nokia
has not even established that there is a viable market for the 770 as it
stands now--these Chinese manufacturers everyone keeps talking about are
going to be more interested in producing (yet another) Windows CE
clone-device for which there is at least an established market.

-- 
Andrew Barr | http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/~andrew/

"Buzzword detected (core dumped)"
  -- seen on linux-kernel at vger.kernel.org