From the better late than never files:

More than two years after I first wrote about Gnash (an open source effort to create an open source Flash player), an official Beta is now available.

The first beta release of Gnash has just been made at version 0.8.2. Gnash is a GPL'd SWF movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript 2 classes. with growing support for SWF v8 and v9.

While the Beta of Gnash does demonstrate a degree of stability and progress in the effort it still has some work to do.  Among the work to be done is full support of the latest Flash version 9 as well as ActionScript 3.

Though this is the first official Beta, work has been ongoing for the past two years getting Gnash up to speed.

Gnash is an important project for the Free Software community. In fact, the creation of a GPL'ed Flash player is a top priority of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).  Even though Adobe has made strides in recent years to be more open with its Flash based technologies,  the FSF and others in the Free Software community still see a real need for a GPL version of Flash  - which to date is something that Adobe has not attempted to do.