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Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:59:13 -0700
From: "David E. Thiel" <lx@FreeBSD.org>
To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
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References: <20080619135114.Y1807@kozubik.com>
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Subject: Re: Lack of Flash support is no longer acceptable. Bounty
	established...
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On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 02:37:48PM -0700, John Kozubik wrote:
> FreeBSD is not useful as a desktop environment without the ability to
> support Flash in a stable, well-performing fashion.

Nonsense. This presumes anything "useful" has ever been written in
flash.

> Free flash alternatives and flash movie players, etc., are, unfortunately,
> not a solution.

While they certainly don't support everything perfectly, swfdec works
fairly well for a large number of sites - notably YouTube and similar
FLV wrappers, which is what most people ultimately use Flash for. Even
if someone got Flash 9 working, we'll just be playing catch-up when
Flash 10 is released and everything starts requiring it. 

While I honestly wish you the best of luck, I do think that developer
effort is much better spent improving free implementations of Flash,
as the spec is fairly open. If there are some particular things that
don't work well for you with swfdec/gnash, why not offer a bounty to
have those fixed? This would be more helpful to more people, like those
not running FreeBSD, and those of us who don't use Linux binary compat -
of which I suspect there are more than you assume.