Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility

[Magnus Glantz]

On 11/18/2010 05:23 AM, Benjamin Kreuter wrote:
> 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.
I agree completely.

On 11/18/2010 05:23 AM, Benjamin Kreuter wrote:
> 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.
But are you referring to something as wide spread as flash? If you are 
thinking about mp3, then I would guess that if for example mp3 stopped 
working on Fedora, we would be in the same seat as today - where a lot 
of people are putting resources into fixing something that they care 
about, but what is not open source.


On 11/18/2010 05:23 AM, Benjamin Kreuter wrote:
>> 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
That is a good point. I feel that this discussion is now "finding it's 
way home". Indeed I would never ask such a thing from anyone.
But I would myself, in this specific case, not think twice before 
clicking on a "yes I agree" button, doing some basic testing to provide 
what I perceive is a necessary evil of today. The same, I guess, goes 
for any proprietary tech that a very large part of our user base could 
not imagine to live without.
I'm not advocating the user of Adobe Flash or any other proprietary 
tech. I think it should be avoided if practically possible, but not to 
all and any costs.

Linus Torvalds asks some questions in the BZ #638477-thread, to try and 
get people to reconsider that it is "Adobe's problem":
1)
QUOTE
"There is no advantage to being just difficult and saying "that app does 
something that it shouldn't do, so who cares?". That's not going to help 
the _user_, is it?
And what was the point of making a distro again? Was it to teach 
everybody a lesson, or was it to give the user a nice experience?"
END QUOTE

2)
QUOTE
"And in the end, the big question is simple:
Are you seriously going to do a Fedora-14 release with a known 
non-working flash player?"
END QUOTE

For me, the answers to these questions is simple.
1) There is no point of just being difficult. The point of making a 
distro is giving the users a nice experience. The very majority of that 
experience is open source, there are a few exceptions, but people are 
working on that, in the mean time, let's try and make stuff work.
2) No..