Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 30th Apr 2008 17:40 UTC
While the technologies used on the web have always been mostly free, with non-free technologies delegated to non-essential parts of the net, this has been changing fast, lately. The popularity of YouTube has demonstrated the pervasiveness of Adobe's Flash, to an extent where not having Flash is one of the big downsides to any alternative operating system. And to possibly make matters worse, Microsoft is pushing its proprietary Silverlight technology. The founder of Mozilla Europe, Tristan Nitot, warns for "the dangers of the proprietary web".
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Member since:
2006-10-08
Don't mind. Most who are tired to be bombarded by unusable "Flash" overloaded pages are tired to open their mouth, too. And if they do, they get modded down, because "Flash" is cool and you cannot exist without it. :-)
Well, I think there are encoders that are free - for example the port swftools, p5-SWF-Builder, -Filer, sswf, vnc2swf (taken from FreeBSD's ports collection), as well as there are fre "alternatives" such as gnash or swfdec. Sadly, the last two mentioned are not 100% capable of what the OS-pedantic "Flash" players are, and furthermore, I'm not sure how good the free "Flash" encoders are - I have to admit that I'm avoiding "Flash" since I (1) didn't find any use for it and (2) the format isn't compatible to the OSes I use.
Would work vice versa, too. "You need to by (insert name of application) to view this important and entertaining adverdizing content." :-)
Hmmm... Realplayer... I think I heared this word years ago... :-)