On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 04:26:35PM -0500, Stephen Powell wrote: > 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. I think we are coming from the same place > > -- Alden's Laws: (1) Giving away baby clothes and furniture is the major cause of pregnancy. (2) Always be backlit. (3) Sit down whenever possible.
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