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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Rhapsody
16 years 21 weeks 6 days 17 hours ago
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.