[Foundation-l] The problem with Flash

[gwern0 at gmail.com]

On 2008.01.20 12:32:52 -0500, Ben McIlwain <cydeweys at 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
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