Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility

[Benjamin Kreuter]

On Wednesday 17 November 2010 16:43:48 Magnus Glantz wrote:
> On 11/17/2010 10:18 PM, Benjamin Kreuter wrote:
> >> 2) Create a work-around for the end-users (as has been done by several
> >> people in the BZ #638477-thread)
> > 
> > This pretty much erases whatever incentive Adobe might have to actually
> > fix the bug.  Instead of fixing their code, now what they can do is use
> > some hack and not bother to update anything.  It also reduces the
> > pressure on Adobe to release the Flash plugin under a libre license,
> > since it would basically amount to the community doing the work to fix
> > the problem while the software is still under a proprietary license.
> 
> But what you describe did not happen just now. There was two separate
> work-arounds (one from Linus Torvalds, replacing memcpy with a custom
> version, using LD_PRELOAD, and one from Ray Strode, replacing the memcpy
> calls in the binary with memmove, using a script) but Adobe still
> notified me today that they are QA/QE:ing a fix.

Well, I am glad that Adobe is committing to fixing the problem, but it is not 
something I would rely on happening in all cases.

> > In the grand scheme of things, this is a bug that Adobe could fix pretty
> > quickly, if they feel like they have a good reason to do that.  Why not
> > put the burden on them?  They release proprietary software, so they take
> > on the responsibility of making sure it works on the platforms they
> > target.
> > 
> > -- Ben
> 
> Because Adobe is not the one that pretty quickly risks loosing users.
> Ignoring flash content on the web is not done as easy as you can change
> between two Linux distributions.
> 
> As it is (I don't like it, probably no one here likes it) a majority of
> the Fedora users are dependent on Adobe Flash working in Fedora. If it
> does not work, then a lot of things they do daily, stops working.

The majority of Fedora users also need support for certain proprietary video 
and audio codecs, but we stick to our guns when it comes to that.

> As long as there is no open source option for the majority of these
> users, why not QA Adobe Flash before a release? It's done easily and has
> great worth to the users.

That would require us to ask people to agree to the proprietary Flash license, 
which is not, in my opinion, philosophically sound.  It is one thing to accept 
bug reports regarding Flash and forward them to Adobe; it is another thing 
entirely to start asking Fedora contributors to test it out.  As I said 
before, Adobe released proprietary software, so Adobe should take on the 
responsibility of performing QA on the platforms they want to support.  If 
Adobe wants to target Fedora, then let them install rawhide and beta releases, 
and make sure that the Flash plugin is still working.

-- Ben



-- 
Message sent on: Wed Nov 17 23:10:27 EST 2010
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