I just found this surprising new project from John Gilmore: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash/2005-12/msg00000.html
---------------- Gnash is a new GNU project to build a media player that's compatible with Macromedia "Shockwave Flash" standards and plays common ".swf" files. Gnash will work both as a standalone application, and as a browser plugin (initially for Firefox).
Gnash is based on the excellent work done on the public domain program "GameSWF", a graphics library for games that contains the heart of a Flash interpreter. Further development will aim this code toward the goal of playing arbitrary Flash "movies". This goal diverges from the goals of the GameSWF maintainers (which are to make a good public domain graphics library for games), and they were unwilling to accept some of our patches as a result. We're forking the code and pushing foward. New code for Gnash will be licensed under the GPL (version 2 or better). I'm sure we can contribute public domain bug fixes back to GameSWF, though our major development will be GPL licensed.
John Gilmore ----------------
More on John Gilmore here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_%28advocate%29
I found out about Gnash in the Take Action section of the gnu.org homepage.