Gnash (ZDNet)

Gnash (ZDNet)

Posted Aug 30, 2006 15:03 UTC (Wed) by landley (guest, #6789)
In reply to: Gnash (ZDNet) by rqosa
Parent article: Interview with Mike Melanson, lead engineer on the Linux Flash Player team (ZDNet)

Why support dvd encryption when there are so many unencrypted video
formats? Why support mp3 playback now that ogg exists? Why did people
get so excited about a Linux word processor that could read and write
*.doc files when we already had so many that couldn't? Why does Samba
exist, let alone have millions of users and conferences devoted to it
(such as http://sambaxp.org/)?

If I want to watch the webcast of The Daily Show, I either have the right
plugin or I don't. I can't get the content in another format, and going
to watch something else is not equivalent.

The senior management at my company uses Exchange for calendaring. None
of the engineers do, but we can't drop the Exchange server off the top of
the building into the alley (we have plans) until we can come up with a
compatible replacement to run on a Linux server.

Unfortunately, none of the open source Linux servers we can find actually
replace exchange for calendaring. What the community decided was "screw
the de-facto standard data exchange format tens of millions of people use
today, supporting that's too much like work. Let's come up with a brand
new format that has no users and wasn't designed by users of the old
format either." And they did this in 1998 (check out the dates on rfc
2445 and 2447), and the result has just totally obsoleted all use of
exchange for calendaring everywhere in the 8 years since, hasn't it?

We did find _three_ proprietary Linux programs that can serve calendars
to outlook clients (and even migrate the old exchange database). The
most promising would only install on Red Hat Enterprise 2. But not one
open source one, because any time anybody writes an open source
calendaring application for Linux they use the RFC. I've never found
anybody who actually _uses_one of these RFC-based calendaring apps, and
there are dozens of them already, but people keep writing because they
seem to think the problem is the apps, not the complete inability to
exchange data with the de-facto standard data format that millions of
people are using today.

"The user's problem was too hard to solve, so I invented a different
problem and solved that instead."

Starting to see a pattern here?

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