Patch for crashing firefox with flash-plugin

[Mike A. Harris]

Denis Leroy wrote:
> Mike A. Harris wrote:
>> Matus Hrusovsky wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> if possible modify please /usr/bin/firefox in next RPM relese of
>>> firefox. Without it firefox-1.5.0.6-9 still crashes with flash-plugin.
>>>
>>> --- /usr/bin/firefox.orig       2006-08-30 10:18:10.000000000 +0200
>>>
>>> +++ /usr/bin/firefox    2006-09-02 18:52:13.000000000 +0200
>>>
>>> @@ -41,6 +41,7 @@
>>>
>>>  then
>>>
>>>    MOZ_LIB_DIR="/usr/lib64"
>>>
>>>  fi
>>>
>>> +export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1
>>>
>>>  MOZ_DIST_BIN="$MOZ_LIB_DIR/firefox-1.5.0.6"
>>>
>>>  MOZ_PROGRAM="$MOZ_DIST_BIN/firefox"
>>>
>>>  MOZ_CLIENT_PROGRAM="$MOZ_DIST_BIN/mozilla-xremote-client"
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Yeah, that will make Macromedia _rush_ to fix flash player to
>> work properly in the future.
> 
> Do you honestly believe this will have any sort of impact over 
> Macromedia's flash 9 linux project (http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/) 
> ? On the contrary, they would divert resources to fix the old flash 7 
> player and that would delay the flash 9 release even more...

Perhaps my sarcasm didn't make my point crystal clear.

By modifying free software in a way that creates limitations, solely
for the purpose of enabling compatibility with non-free software,
the free software once again remains hostage to proprietary software.

People who require flash support can either try using the gnash plugin,
or can work around the brokenness of the flash plugin manually.  Or hey,
by setting the environment variable themselves.  Or even by having it
dropped in place by the flash player rpm package.

Don't pollute free software with limitations caused due to proprietary
stuff which is never going to get fixed.  That does not promote the
vendors of the proprietary software to fix their software, or to rush
to care about the problems in the first place.  Leave it broken and
unuseable and let the proprietary vendor's email mailboxes fill and
telephones ring off the wall.

I honestly don't care what Macromedia does.  All I care, is that free
software remains free, and has as few kludges and hack workarounds in
it to work around brokenness of non-free software.  If I wanted to be
tangled in the ugly web of proprietary software and vendor lockin, I
would use Microsoft Windows exclusively.

And yes, for the record, I do actually use Macromedia flash in Linux
on occasion, and I believe my punishment for doing so, should be to
manually work around problems with it myself if the producer of the
product doesn't fix it.



-- 
Mike A. Harris * Open Source Advocate * http://mharris.ca

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