You may not have heard about Gnash, the GNU project’s (the people who gave us the famous General Public License for software distribution, under which Linux was filed by Linus Torvalds) high-priority development of a Free, Open Source Flash Player.

This project, while still in alpha stage, is especially useful for the handful of folks who use Linux/BSD on non-x86 processor architectures (including AMD64 and the now discontinued PowerPC), since neither Adobe nor the former Macromedia (the original creator of Flash and Shockwave) provided binaries of any kind to these OSes or architectures (only to Linux on standard x86, Mac, and Windows). Gnash is the only flash player that they can get at this point.

I’m expecting for Gnash to be made available to Mac (both PPC and Intel-x86) and Windows once it gets off the ground. Once it does, though, would it be possible that you’ll find Youtube or Google Videos on Wikipedia?

See, Wikipedia makes heavy use of GPL’ed software (it runs on Red Hat Linux servers), and all written articles are immediately registered under another GNU license, the Free Documentation License. Plus, all audio submitted to the Wikimedia Commons is in .ogg format (a free, open-source container format under a Xiph.org license), and images which have been created just to be stored on Wikipedia are filed under either the Free Art License or the much more famous CReative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 (which is used by Flickr.com).

Also, SVG (W3C’s vector graphic standard) seems to be a favored format for imagery, and the format is in the public domain, even though it is rarely used for animation purposes. SWF, on the other hand, has to be reverse-engineered by the GNU project.

So if Gnash comes to Windows and OS X, will we be seeing GVids or Youtubes in the Wikimedia Commons for reference purposes? Or, better yet, will we see “Wikivideos” in Flash format on WP and other Wikis throughout the Web?

Or is Flash in need of a replacement, like, say, from Microsoft?

Even a KDE Developer weighed in on why Gnash may not be the best idea (I feel him on the parts about [1] how SWF, in its closed state, is only being empowered by efforts like that of Gnash and [2] how the FOSS developer community has a problem on its hands by the lack of a competing, attractive alternative).

Whatever it may be, I see lightweight, browser-based videos for Wiki reference as being in the best possible interests of Wikipedia and other wikis in the near future.

Hopefully, most likely, and just like anything else on Wikipedia, it’ll be provided, distributed, and accessed in a truly open and free manner.