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Back when being a student, I remembered following GNU Gnash effort to support for AS2 and AS3, they took years, but in the end, still could only make it work partially. Flash was still dominant in the browsers at the time, yet nobody managed to port to Gnash before it died.

I wonder how Ruffle get it working so fast.

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they were probably less anal than GNU over licences

Why would the license matter to implementation speed?

it tends to be hard to reverse engineer something with an explicit agreement that if you use it, you will not reverse it

or at least, that was the fear at the time so, imagine making a program like gnash, without installing flash

as it turned out, adobe never could actually enforce such a thing, but that didn't stop gnash from absolutely turning into a ghost town

memory is a bit hazy, but thats the gist I got back then

they were so careful, they buried the project, well done

Oh, you mean they were careful about licensing on the in side, not the output side. I wouldn't call it "anal" to want to avoid lawsuits.

Edit: You can't edit in

> as it turned out, adobe never could actually enforce such a thing,

and not explain it - did the courts change their whole view of reverse engineering or something?

I don't have knowledge specific to this case, but the license limits who you can accept code from.

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