Nick, it sounds like you've been doing corporative development for far too long... it is painful, indeed, to hear the horrible stories of Apple corporation in a battle of interests against Microsoft corporation and Adobe getting in between the fires... but again, what you say about Linux is said from a position of corporative logic, which does not apply in that domain. You wanted to develop flash runtime that has nice GUI, but no command line interface for Linux - what for? having the exact opposite would be great though. I would be indefinitely happy if I could run ActionScript w/o any requirement of X-server! In fact, having to do the opposite is pain! It is a complete misunderstanding of the audience. Why can't Flash runtime be built for Linux same, as, for example, V8? Designers don't work on Linux anyway, what does work there is the compilation servers, programmers and robots :P Same thing for code editors - really, very few Linux users even like reach GUI stuff, you cannot "buy" votes in that audience by providing nice graphics, because very few people care about that, but not being able to incorporate Flash player in a testing process sucks. After all, I'm sorry to say that, but even Gnome (which, in folklore is called a toy desktop manager) has fewer bugs then whatever Window 7 is using, so I'm not buying into the "difficult to build" agenda - it's difficult, because little effort has been made. WinAPI isn't a walk in the park either.
Just because I'm being a prick, OSS != free. More yet, OSS does not imply free and free does not imply OSS. There is no contradiction in paying for a program, that comes with sources, likewise, there's no contradiction in giving a program for free, while not showing the sources. Not showing the sources, in my opinion, is rude, but since a lot of companies do that (just the same as a lot of people are rude), it's not possible to fight them all :) PS. In any case, regardless of what we write here, it's all sort of flame, and people who make these decisions probably aren't really interested in even hearing points of view... Best. Oleg
