FSF Announces GNU Gnash - Flash Movie Player

Boston, Massachusetts, USA - Monday, January 9, 2006 - The Free Software Foundation announced today the addition of Gnash, the GNU Flash movie player and Firefox plugin, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).

Gnash is a project to build a SWF version 7 compliant flash player with high-quality imaging. It is the most advanced free flash player that currently exists, and an important addition to the GNU project. The release of Gnash represents the achievement of one of the free software movement's high priority projects (see http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html).

Rob Savoye, maintainer of Gnash, outlined details of the project and made a call for developer support, "Right now Gnash is playing more movies than any of the other free players. All ActionScript classes exist and work, but not all the methods of each class are fully implemented. With a few more developers, it could be reasonably complete in a few months."

Features include:

• Runs as a standalone application - Gnash can run standalone to play flash movies.
• Firefox plugin - Gnash can run as a plugin from within Firefox and Mozilla.
• SWF v7 compliant - Gnash can play many current flash movies.
• XML Message server - Gnash also supports an XML-based message system as is documented in the Flash Format specification.
• High Quality Output - Gnash uses OpenGL for rendering the graphics.

The home page of the project is at http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/. The Gnash development sources are accessible via anonymous CVS from http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnash/. The anonymous CVS services are provided by Savannah, a web front-end for hosting and maintaining project homepages, bug tracking, CVS, FTP, and mailing lists, running entirely on free software, without ads, for the entire community.

Gnash development is being funded by PubSoft. PubSoft supports free software projects by connecting developers with funding (https://www.pubsoft.org/pubsoft.py/viewprojects).

About the Free Software Foundation:

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software - particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants - and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software. Their web site, located at www.fsf.org, is an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support their work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Their headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.