According to an article on newteevee.com, “the Electronic Frontier Foundation is upset about Adobe's efforts to add digital rights management” to the Flash format. This is Adobe's attempt to get in good with the “ad-supported streaming TV market.” The announcement to have Flash DRM came in April by an outside vendor, Widevine. So, what does this mean for Linux and the already lackluster support of Flash Player? We won't even bother going into the potential mess this is going to cause for Flash users in general; how many people are going to be able to take clips of their favorite shows and movies and turn them into YouTube tributes? That aside, will Linux even be able to play these DRM Flash movies? Probably not. It's not like other DRM mediums are well-supported on Linux, if they're supported at all. So, is this “so long and farewell” to Flash for Linux?

The Flash Player on Linux is a terrible, buggy application. There isn't even 64-bit support yet, so most Linux users on 64-bit systems need to either install 32-bit browsers or create wrapper plug-ins for their 32-bit flash player plugin. The Flash Player is so badly supported that I have found that on Adobe's own website, which uses Flash Player for the top level menu doesn't even display correctly on my Ubuntu PC running 32-bit Firefox with Flash player. Is this a joke? The Flash Player they give us doesn't even work correctly with their own website? Shame on Adobe for releasing such a terrible product. Notice in the screen shot below, as I hover over the menu item for “Solutions”; it's completely cut off by the Flash player movie directly beneath it. This is pathetic. I guess my only real "solution" then is to stop using Flash. And now on top of this already buggy, shoddy plug-in, we have to face the possibility of DRM being in Flash? I guess we might as well say goodbye to flash all together.

Maybe, and I hate to say it, we Linux users can expect something better with the Mono project's porting of Microsoft's Silverlight to Linux, known as Moonlight. This isn't what I want; what I want is for Adobe to stop jerking us around and get their act together. They should start porting all of their applications over to Linux.

Adobe, we're sick of Windows; we don't want to virtualize it; we don't want to use Wine to run your applications; we want you to put two and two together and realize that as small as our market share might seem on paper, there's actually quite a lot of us. And every day, our open source products are getting better and better, catching up to your programs (in some cases surpassing them), and before you know it, we won't even remember your name.

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