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Brion Vibber wrote:
In many cases that'll cover the same ground as non-free formats; the main exceptions are for patent-encumbered standards (eg, the MPEG family
- MP3, AAC, H.264, etc) and widely-deployed proprietary formats that
have been reverse-engineered by FOSS developers (eg, Flash).
On the subject of Flash, I think it might help to relate my experiences so that everyone on this list knows how deficient it is on free software platforms. (This isn't directed to you Brion, as that'd just be preaching to the choir :-P )
I run GNU/Linux on my laptop. Pretty much everything works and I'm able to do everything I do in Windows, except Flash. First of all, the free software Flash alternatives simply aren't there yet. They aren't good enough for everyday use. And even if they were, they still wouldn't be free, because they're infringing on various patents that Adobe no doubt holds. And the free software stuff isn't good enough to create Flash either, so you still need to pay the tax in the form of the creator program (which as far as I know doesn't run on GNU/Linux). You can see why this is unacceptable.
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.