Scaleform GFx is a commercial alternative Flash player that features full hardware acceleration using the GPU and has high conformance with both Flash 10 ActionScript 3 and Flash 8 AS2. It supports only the new ActionScript 3 VM introduced in Flash 9. Besides hardware-accelerated rendering, it exploits multithreading and JIT compilation. Lightspark is a new implementation aiming to create a more modern and fast player. Swfdec is another open-source flash player available for Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. Gnash runs on Windows, Linux, and other operating systems on 32-bit, 64-bit, and other architectures. Despite potential patent worries because of the proprietary nature of the files involved, Gnash supports most SWF v7 features and some SWF v8 and v9. Gnash is an active project that aims to create a free player and browser plugin for the Adobe Flash file format and so provide a free alternative to the Adobe Flash Player under the GNU General Public License. The continual high ranking of Gnash on the Free Software Foundation's list of high priority projects might indicate the severity of the problem, as judged by the free software community. Therefore, the lack of a good free Flash player is arguably an obstacle to enjoying the web with free software, and the aforementioned ubiquity of Flash makes the problem very evident for anyone who tries. Many important and popular websites require users to have a Flash player, sometimes with no fallback for non-Flash web users. As of February 2010, Gnash and Swfdec have seen limited success in competing with Adobe's player. Stallman's argument then was that no free players were comparatively good enough. The use of Flash in websites is a major problem for our community. Representing the free software movement, Richard Stallman stated in a speech on October 2004 that:
There is no complete free software replacement which offers all the functionality of the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. Flash Player cannot ship as part of a pure open source, or completely free operating system, as its distribution is bound to the Macromedia Licensing Program Because Flash files do not depend on an open standard such as SVG, this reduces the incentive for non-commercial software to support the format, although there are several third-party tools which use and generate the SWF file format.
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