Re: [Fsfe-uk] Yesterdays Defective by Design event in London

[Jon Grant]

Hi

Alex Hudson wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-10-06 at 15:50 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
>> Others know Free Flash better than I do.  Last I saw was 
>> http://web.archive.org/web/20050205034327/http://www.affs.org.uk/~alex/HowDoWeReplaceFlash
>> which seems to have been removed from www.affs.org.uk since.
>> Anyone know where that info lives now?
> 
> It got taken down because of spam abuse; we do still have it, but it
> does really need to be updated.
> 
> Gnash is on my list of things to try out, but I'd love to hear from
> anyone who's tried it.
> 
> Flash is relatively non-DRM'd; to be honest, it's just not that great a
> media delivery system anyway. Vector animation it does outstandingly
> well, video and audio are definitely poor cousins.
> 
> Like MJ, I have no particular love of Adobe, and it's a shame that they
> continue to peddle the 'must be 100% compatible' meme when asked about a
> free software player. It's mostly within their purview (granted maybe
> not mp3, etc.) and Sun have seemed to have given up the same excuse for
> free Java.

It's a shame the US's FSF are promoting the "Flash" format via their
plugin development as a long term solution. (Seems to contradict their
positive anti-MS-Word stance?? I don't see them advocating us all use
AbiWord for its great support for MS-Word)

In my view we should focus on replacing their binary file-format which
is handled by a proprietary browser plugin with open technologies browsers
can support natively.  Then we can select text and bookmark things which
are presently hidden in "Flash" files.

Cheers
Jon