Re: What Package?
> There are evidently serious flaws in Flash, either its design or its
> implementation, that warrant all the negativity, but the odd thing is that
> the clear technical unbiased treatment of the issue seems to be completely
> swamped by quasi religious fervour. Those of us who haven't seen the facts,
> now can't find them. Can anyone point to anything unbiased that explains
> the issue?
It's resolutely and staunchly proprietary.
So, you can't know what it really does, the user has no control over it.
Using it grants control of your computer to Adobe, fundamentally.
Obviously, it's not the only proprietary program, so the reason why it's
so despised is that it's one of the very few proprietary programs that
lots and lots of people "need" in order to do "ordinary activities",
such as buy some tickets on-line.
I used to stay away from sites that used Flash for this reason (and it
came with added benefit that many ads were using flash, so a browser
without flash support also automatically skipped lots of ads).
Then I got by using Gnash. And nowadays I'm back to "no flash" because
flash-only sites are rare enough again (and many sites actually work
better if I don't have any flash player, actually, than if I have Gnash
installed).
Of course, now that flash is being replaced with Javascript, we're
learning about the other nasty part: the problem was not just that the
flash player was proprietary, but also that the flash code (now the
javascript code) downloaded from the internet is itself proprietary.
And even when it's Free Software, it's terribly difficult to benefit
from that freedom (i.e. it can be difficult to find the actual source
code (rather than its minified version), and it's even harder to be
able to use a modified version of it).
Stefan
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