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In reply to: Flash is more than toys by smoogen
Parent article: Flash players for Linux
Yeah, though no-one really sane person will start to extensively use a non-open non-standard format, which has only one company's player that can be used to play the content (and that one company actively tries to prevent the development of eg. free software counterparts by denying the use of specs to develop players etc.)
Most companies limit the use of Flash to advertising and product informations, and many companies even understand that is often stupid to do even that with Flash - for pure advertising it might be okay, but product pages are basically always harder to use, harder to find (google) if they are done in Flash.
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competency vs insanity
Posted Jan 13, 2006 16:49 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]
"though no-one really sane person will start to extensively use a non-open non-standard format"
The majority of IT people do just that every single day, and there's no question of their sanity. Quite the opposite, I'd argue that only an insane person would avoid the use of a very powerful tool simply out of unfounded fears of the tool suddenly ceasing to work anytime during the lifetime of the material in question.
Openness is useful, *very* useful, but it is still just one point out of many to look at when evaluating a technology. In many circumstances the efficiency of some proprietary tool is going to be worth a lot more to a particular project than openness. Part of being a competent (and sane) IT worker is being able to make those sorts of objective evaluations and coming up with the best solution, not just the most open solution.