Re: Flash games

["Benjamin Otte" <otte gnome org>]

On Jan 23, 2008 4:59 PM, Jason D. Clinton <me jasonclinton com> wrote:
> So, if I understand your perspective correctly, a sufficiently free (libre)
> alternative to Flash would be embedding a SVG+ECMAScript renderer in a Gnome
> shell.
>
It's the most similar thing to Flash. And it definitely is more free.
I can't say however if it's a good choice for creating games right now
as I have no clue about how well SVG is supported in current browsers
(both completeness and speed) nor do I know anything about the
features of IDEs for those.

> I haven't been involved in the discussion up until now. It seems to me that
> those who started this discussion were looking for interesting ways to
> expand the Gnome Games offerings without increasing the (un)maintainability
> of our variant code-base. The attraction of Flash is that there a ton of
> existing content out there targeted for the web: if even a tiny fraction of
> those copyright holders agree to relicense their game LGPL, that would be a
> huge boost to what we could conceivably deliver to end users in a default
> Gnome install.
>
The problem will likely be that the sources for those games will be
available in the FLA format. FLA is the Flash Authoring format, which
afaik can only be interpreted by the Flash authoring tools. So you'd
end up with free sources in a closed format and would not be able to
edit or create executables from them.

Cheers,
Benjamin