Potential For Free Animation Software Dead?

June 24th, 2011 by Jacob Barkdull

There was a time when I was obsessed with finding good, free, stable, Adobe Flash animation software, because at the time I was also obsessed with Homestar Runner and other online cartoons and I wanted to make my own. This was before I knew about how much hassle Flash actually is across multiple platforms and long before I knew of the disadvantages of making online animations in proprietary formats.

The projects below are projects I watched come to life and come to pass, in a very short time. These projects are as-good-as-dead, either no longer maintained, or maintained and receive patches but haven't had any new features implemented in years. They're doomed to become either unmaintained or have development stalled.

Is the potential for free animation software dead? Not really. Besides the fact that potential for any kind of free application being developed is basically endless in the Free Software community with the Open Source software development methodology, we still have Synfig Studio.

So despite an arguably clunky user interface, and with the web moving away from Flash, Synfig is a great application for 2D animation. And it's only getting better with every release.

Check out this video that YouTube user Kumeelyun made using Synfig Studio and only Free Software:

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