On 2008.01.20 12:32:52 -0500, Ben McIlwain cydeweys@gmail.com scribbled 2.3K characters: ...
Even the official Adobe Flash player plugin for Mozilla Firefox on GNU/Linux is deficient. It's treated like a third-rate product by Adobe, sometimes seeing major version updates many months after the Windows plugin is released. In the mean time, new Flash content that depends on the new features simply won't work. And the plugin itself is just bad. It frequently crashes Firefox, some of its functionality plain old doesn't work, etc. And nevermind that it's not free in any sense of the word except gratis; it's all binary, the source isn't available, so it's all entirely anti-libre.
From where I stand, Flash isn't even an option to be considered in fulfilling the Foundation's mission statement of "developing educational content under a free license or in the public domain". It won't even run on a completely free system, and it will only run poorly on a partially free system (giving in and installing their binary-only plugin). It is, simply, not what we are looking for.
Ooh, and don't forget if you use a half-way modern system (*cough*64-bit processor*cough*), you have to have the 32-bit libraries installed and misc. binaries (for emulation) enabled in the kernel!
-- gwern Freeh ASU 32 CIO GGL Force 97 b in Macintosh