[ale] Flash Video

[Scott Castaline]

On 06/19/2010 02:25 PM, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-06-19 at 13:09 -0400, Scott Castaline wrote:
>> What alternatives does one have besides Adobe or Novell/M$ Moonlight?
>> I
>> am not able to view youtube videos or other flash videos. I did have
>> (I
>> am ashamed to admit it) have moonlight installed on my F12 system. I
>> thought VLC was supposed to be able to play flv files but it does not
>> and I don't see any errors.
>
> There is a new implementation of the Flash specification, though at the
> moment its name escapes me.  It is a free software implementation.
>
> Why are you ashamed to have installed a free software plugin for your
> slightly-less-than-free-software Web browser (assuming we're talking
> about Firefox here)?  It is, after all, free software.  It is no
> different than Flash or Java or what-have-you in terms of it being a
> free software reimplementation of something that is not (or was not
> originally) free software.
>
> 	--- Mike
>
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I'm just looking at it from the perspective of the fact that it comes 
from SuSE/Novel and the fact that Novel has paid fees to Micro$oft under 
threatening circumstances, and that it is a clone of a Micro$oft 
product. I am not a software engineer or a lawyer so to me moonlight is 
accepting the bait for a potential trap. I may be wrong, have been in 
the past and probably will be in the future, just the way I feel. I was 
under the impression that Gnash was a GPL alternative to Adobe Flash and 
with the recent issues with Adobe I wanted to also avoid that as well. 
But if I am wrong about Moonlight, than I'm perfectly willing to use it 
again with out feeling that I'm contributing to the evil empire of 
Micro$haft.