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July 25, 2006
Unforking Linux
Unforking Linux: I've been fascinated by the discussion around Mike Melanson's blog, about the work on bringing Adobe Flash Player to Linux distributions, but I haven't said much because, uh, I've been afraid of getting beat up. ;-) Like Ryan Stewart I've been very impressed by their passion, even though I wish more would listen before speaking. One common thread in the advice is "just opensource it and we'll fix everything". But that's one of the big problems with Linux -- there isn't a single distribution with standard APIs like Windows or Macintosh, and a lot of the difficulty is in enticing the wide number of Linux configurations to act the same, especially as content authors work with richer media and richer interactions. The work with the Adobe Flash Player seems, to me, to be smoothing over these differences among distributions that were introduced with the sourcecode releases. I'm concerned about clone Players and Player forking, but with Linux, it almost seems like we're trying to un-fork a situation where choice is quite large, so that content authors don't have to deal with those differences.
Posted by JohnDowdell at July 25, 2006 03:33 PM
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Comments
Maybe I'm being naive here, but what's wrong with you using SDL? http://www.libsdl.org/
Posted by: Jeff Schiller at July 28, 2006 04:39 AM