Lightspark 0.5.3 released

There's a fresh release for the Lightspark Flash player, the third one on an approximately monthly schedule.

Most new changes in 0.5.3 are robustness and portability fixes and a working Windows port, the vast majority of it being done by Matthias Gehre.

Coverage of the testsuite from the Tamarin VM is also progressing well.

The source tarball and .exe installer are found on Launchpad

Ubuntu user can get updated packages from the daily PPA for Natty and Oneiric.

You can follow the development version and contribute on github.

Lightspark 0.5.1 released

After over two months of work since 0.5.0 by a handful of developers, there's finally a new release of Lightspark, the (other) open source Flash player. Unlike Gnash, Lightspark supports the AVM2 virtual machine and the newest versions of SWF files, while falling back to Gnash when it encounters SWF8 or earlier content.

News for users

For users, the most visible change is that YouTube is working again - their player keeps getting updated and sometimes it introduces Flash APIs or VM opcodes which are not fully implemented in Lightspark, resulting in breakage.

Flowplayer had been made to work in this cycle.

EGL/GLES2 based rendering has been added so it can run at reasonable speeds on ARM hardware where there is generally no support for hardware accelerated desktop OpenGL.

Less crashes due to the many small and large fixes added.

Changelog for 0.5.1

* Misc fixes to better support YouTube, Vimeo, Flowplayer
* VM correctness improvements
* Support for AS templates
* Dropped half-finished AVM1 support
* Support for EGL/GLES2 rendering
* Support for loading external JPEGs
* Better text handling(e.g. coloring)
* Improved test runner, support for the Tamarin testsuite
* Various API fixes for bugs uncovered by the testsuite
* Dropped mozilla dependency, use internal NPAPI headers
* Added LIGHTSPARK_PLUGIN_LOGLEVEL environment variable to control the log level of the browser

News for the project

Alessandro, the main author and original maintainer of the project is taking a break for a few months, so most development and project management in this cycle has been done by the existing contributors.

The Lightspark team is planning to release new versions monthly from now on, to get the fixes out sooner.

We also plan to move away from the sourceforge.net homepage and wiki, and manage the project using only two instead of three hosting services :)

* github for code, wiki and developer related issues

* launchpad for user bugtracker, mailing list, release tarballs and Ubuntu PPAs

Download

The release is already available in Debian Sid and Ubuntu Oneiric and there are daily builds available in the team's PPA for Ubuntu Natty and Oneiric. The upstream code is progressing rapidly and does not really add regressions so using these daily packages is pretty safe and also helps a lot with testing.

The release tarball is on Launchpad for other distro packagers or people building from source...

https://launchpad.net/lightspark/0.5.1

...although for the latter category I'd suggest to follow the project on github :)

https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark

Public tender of about 3mil EUR explicitly disqualifies 'GPL and similar' software

There's a government procurement bid going on in Romania for creating the software and infrastructure to modernize criminal records' access within the country and to interoperate with European countries' similar systems.

It is likely to become one of the many overpriced, poorly specified and poorly implemented solutions that are cranked out by companies that would not survive in the private sector but are close to the decision-makers and are tacitly supported by large IT companies whose proprietary software and expensive hardware have key roles such projects. Nothing new here.

What sets it apart however from other cases, at least to my knowledge is that in the general requirements section there's a small paragraph stating:

"All versions of sofware that are part of the offer must not be published under a 'free software license' - GPL or similar"

So far, while definitely the exceptions, there still were Apache, MySQL or Linux server deployments under the umbrella of various public projects but I have not seen cases of explicitly forbidding open source software in a project's requirement.
There were phrasings such as 'must run well in .NET/Win2003' which could be explained by lack of awareness of other platforms but this is very explicit, without a rationale given.

The 101 page requirements document is so obviously put together by people who have little knowledge of technology but who make up for that by generous use of enterprise buzzwords and ridiculous requirements (DB must allow storage of large quantities of records for ex a 100 million, system must run SQL commands without locking the whole table but only affected records) that all the silliness in it is not even funny.

I am not sure if it is entirely financed by the Romanian government or EU funds are sunk into it as well, but either way, sigh.

Ironically the criterion for picking the winner of the tender is 'lowest price'.

Links in romanian

Summary info on the tender

Specs/requirements document

Common ARM build failures in Ubuntu

In preparation for tomorrow's 'Common ARM build failures' session that is part of Ubuntu Developer Week I started a wiki page. Feel free to read it if you plan on attending :)

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/FTBFS

Help gather AVI video files for Shotwell testing

The Shotwell developers need small AVI files created by diverse cameras to improve metadata handling of such videos. If your camera creates AVI, consider uploading a short video in their wiki.

This mail has the details.

Women's rights and Avaaz

Avaaz.org is a successful online community of over 5 million participants that often gathers signatures and donations for various causes - wildlife and environment preservation, revealing corruption, opposing exaggerated corporate lobbies, etc.

Many of their campaigns are raising awareness of women and girls being severely mistreated and threatened in various places in the world. Since gender inequality is a recurring topic on the planets, some may be interested in contributing to campaigns against systematic and even legally allowed abuse and discrimination; the latter is a much greater problem than those that the occasional disgruntled, tactless, supposedly funny or even blissfully unaware male geeks cause, making the FOSS world seem like a hostile place to women.

More Shotwell contributions

Patches for video upload support to Flickr and Facebook were just accepted and commited to trunk and will be available in Shotwell 0.8, most likely this month :)