Re: Java plugins in 64bit Debian
On 2010-01-11 at 16:04:26 -0500, Alex Samad wrote:
> I am not arguing that, and I agree with what you have said about them
> making it free.
>
> The issue is the icedtea plugin is touted as a replacement for the sun
> plugin, and it clearly doesn't work properly
I hear you. Of course, there is a Sun plugin too, and you have to install
that yourself as well, which may mean de-installing other software to
avoid conflicts.
At the risk of "hijacking" a thread, I had a similar
problem with Flash player plugins. The "free" and default flash player
for Etch was constantly crashing my browser. With Lenny it was much
more reliable, and it would play a higher percentage of flash plugins
correctly, but it still didn't play some of them correctly. At present,
there are two pieces of non-free software that I typically install.
One is Sun Java. The other is Adobe Flash Player. Philosophically,
I much prefer free software. But I'm enough of a pragmatist that I
install those two pieces of software because the "it works" feature
is the most important thing to me.
Writers of free software are often at a distinct disadvantage.
The format of the data files is often proprietary and undocumented.
They literally have to guess at the format. Sometimes they guess right
and sometimes they don't. If web page creators would use free and open
formats for their web content, it would help. But when they use
proprietary tools to create the web pages in the first place, it
should come as no surprise that the generated web pages use proprietary
data file formats.
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