Gnash is the GNU SWF Player, an high priority free software project.
I joined Gnash development in January 2006, shortly after the project start announcement.
I had an history of trying to find viable solutions to the lack of a free flash platform by following development of various free SWF players. At that time I was contributing to gplflash, for being the only GPL licensed one. But rumors of licence changes and community responses on my proposal to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation kept me cold about it. When an official GNU player was announced I quickly jumped in, together with most other developers of gplflash.
Thanks to the excellent fundraising job of Rob Savoye, official maintainer of Gnash, an handful of people was been able to work a considerable amount of daily hours on the project, making it rapidly grow into usable shape. Interestingly enough, many people also contributed their time to the project either for their own passion or with external fundings.
In late 2008 Gnash was the free flash player of choice for the Skolelinux project, who contributed in getting the development team together.
From 2009 I'm in partnership with Linux Fund to raise funds for specific subprojects within Gnash. Linux Fund is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and donations are tax-deductible within the limitations of U.S. federal income tax laws.