On Sat, 07 Apr 2012 12:35:17 +0530, Wolfgang Rosenauer
... Actually I prepared a long post on-topic of this thread but threw it away as I noticed that everything has been said already. I try to sum up what I understood now.
I've seen no single convincing argument why it's better for openSUSE and our users to drop the Flash plugin now. Graham's proposal had no real argument for it besides things like - Adobe abandoned it (partly true) - Flash is crap (always has been true) - Flash is a security mess (always has been true) (but it's a 3rd-party vendor promising security updates for another 5 years) - Apple dropped it already which are no arguments why we should drop it at this moment IMHO.
It's absolutely unrealistic that our decision will have any impact on the web so it's not even a political decision to force the web to do something (as opposed to Apple's weight). Flash will die over the next years. Let's get rid of it when it's time but not now.
exactly; it's not a distro's business to force their users to become better cyber-citizens, or better human beings even. present reality is that many don't want to live without flash, perhaps even can't, and openSUSE should make it possible for them to achieve that. doesn't matter if the flash plugin comes from an external repo or one of the core ones; everybody uses codecs from packman after all, and those are (at least legally) tainted and not strictly necessary either. once it becomes known that due to flash many openSUSE machines are getting infected, that would be different, but i haven't seen that yet. it's always been known as a resource hog & security risk, but that hasn't stopped many from using it. education is great, and so would be work on flash alternatives if there's any hope for success. in the longer term flash will go away, and unless there's a large new security hole, openSUSE should just wait it out and follow the needs of their users. -- phani. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org