[haiku-development] Re: Adobe Flash on Haiku

Simon Taylor wrote:
I remember seeing the Flash 9 for linux blog before they publicly released it, and the Adobe guy seemed to be responding to comments. I think I'll try contacting him personally. 

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/ is the blog.
I did find Mike's email address (I think) and sent him a private email about it. He didn't respond though, so more official channels would have to be approached by more official people. The mail I sent is below, hopefully it won't have hindered any future Haiku-Adobe relations, and I thought it was worth a try! 

Simon

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Hi Mike,
Firstly thanks for your work on Flash 9 for Linux. It's great that Adobe's taking the users of alternative systems seriously.
I'm a follower of a new open source (MIT) operating system, currently still pre-alpha, called Haiku - which is an open source recreation of BeOS (an OS that achieved some success in the late 90s before failing as a commercial proposition). Haiku is now beginning to reach the stage of being interesting - it is almost feature complete for R1 (USB still needs some work) and fully binary compatible with BeOS R5 (meaning we already have access to things like Firefox and AbiWord ports (of varying quality)). Briefly the goals are a simple, fast, desktop OS with a consistent system-wide C++ API, and without the plethora of choices that can confuse those new to Linux. There's more information at www.haiku-os.org should you be interested. It's not a unix variant really but does support a large chunk of POSIX.
The reason I'm emailing is to test the water about how supportive Adobe might be of a Flash port. Obviously the user base is minuscule compared even with minority platforms such as FreeBSD, so I would obviously not expect Adobe to fund an internal team for the development. But would there be any chance of, for example, someone signing an NDA and getting a look at the Linux source in order to produce a closed-source port? Back in the day BeOS had a commercial Flash 4 player after a small company purchased the Flash Player SDK - that might be another potential route for us (although it seems the current Player SDK only supports up to Flash 7).
I realise it is incredibly rude to email you personally about this, but thought I might stand more chance of getting some personal feeling about it than with just putting the idea into the wish form. I promise I won't pester you again if you don't reply. 

Yours hopefully

Simon
(Not an official Haiku representative in any way, just an interested observer!)

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