Flash Player on FreeBSD

Michael Vince mv at thebeastie.org
Wed Apr 12 01:45:21 UTC 2006


Andrew Pantyukhin wrote:

>On 4/10/06, Jeff Cross <jeff.cross at averageadmins.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>I wonder what got Linux on board?
>>    
>>
>
>Well, what do you think? Do you think Microsoft paid Macromedia
>to include the player in Win98 or do you think Macromedia paid
>through the nose to get there?
>
>I think much effort should be spent to make hardware companies
>open specs. The open source world should make it clear that it is
>only to their benefit. Legislature should be encouraged. As for
>software technologies like flash - I think they are great. And while
>I might even donate a few bucks for them to be available in
>FreeBSD, but I really think that time should better be spent trying
>to develop SVG and such so we can forget about the proprietary
>hell we're stumbling upon every other day.
>_______________________________________________
>
>  
>
Sounds like your expecting expecting Macromedia to open source their 
flash work, this is never going to happen while it makes them money.

While I am sure Macromedia want to have flash player anywhere they can 
where its sure to return a profit for them I think your to far away in 
some ideal world to believe that Macromedia would spend maybe more then 
50k a year to provide top notch flash support on FreeBSD when I am quite 
sure they would be thinking the actual amount of users will probably be 
around 5,000 who would use their FreeBSD pc as their most common 
multimedia enabled browser.

I still think that a certain amount of money could be offered to 
Macromedia to port the linux version to FreeBSD even it was just a very 
occasional binary release, just having any binary module that is even 
not the latest would make a world of difference.
This seems like a very realistic goal to me.  As some companies who have 
created binary stuff for FreeBSD such as the Zend PHP encoder seem to 
work on a policy of doing a bit but not as much as they probably could, 
I am still using FreeBSD 4.x compat4 binary compatibility package so I 
can use the Zend PHP optimizer/encoder to encode PHP work on a FreeBSD 6 
machine.

Mike





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