Gnash Flash Player Still Advancing, But No New Release

Gnash, the Free Software Foundation project to have an open-source implementation of Adobe's Flash/SWF run-time, hasn't seen a release in almost exactly one and a half years. While it's been 18 months without a new release, development continues and there's been a number of features committed.

The Gnash 0.8.10 release arrived last February with new features. Since then, development has continued with Git commits occurring frequently, but there hasn't been a new tagged release. It's a bit of a surprise given that Adobe Flash is still widely used and Gnash is considered a "high priority" FSF project.

In digging through the Git log since the 0.8.10 release, among the changes currently sitting for the yet-to-be-planned 0.8.11 release include:

- IPv6 support. There's also IPv4 improvements.

- Support for modern GCC compiler releases. LLVM Clang compiler updates are also included.

- C++11 compilation mode support.

- Fixes/changes for handling the latest FFmpeg and libav libraries.

- Continued Google Android enablement work and as part of that making OpenGL ES 1 (GLES1) support work.

- Various bug-fixes. Some items in particular include stability fixes for parsing and image handling along with when Gnash is serving as a NPAPI plug-in.

The latest Git activity for the open-source Gnash Flash Player can be found via savannah.gnu.org. Meanwhile, two other interesting open-source Flash projects are Lightspark and Shumway.