Linked by Eugenia Loli on Sun 25th Dec 2005 04:24 UTC
Multimedia, AV Ex-Amiga hacker and ex-BeOS engineer Tinic Uro, now at Macromedia, blogged about the next version of Flash Player for Linux. Apparently version 8 will be skipped and the Linux version will see some extra love on upcoming version 8.5.
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Ringheims Auto
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Saying that Flash is not standard is insane. It comes bundled with Windows, is installed on the vast majority of all computers, and is the most used method for delivering interactive web multimedia. There are no OSS alternatives. SVG is only now beginning to appear in some browsers, is incomplete compared to Flash, and has a fraction of the developers behind it.

These are not arguments for Flash being a standard. Being a standard is not equal to having it installed on "almost all machines", standards has to be agreed upon by several parties, and with an open standard, the specifications are regulated by the involved parties (not by one company as in the case of Flash). Flash is rather Macromedia's idea, and while being available to loads of machines (except mine with Flash 8 as you can see, and Flash for my old iMac I loaded up with Ubuntu), it's not at all a standard.
If it had been Free Software (GPL or equivalent) it had helped a lot, since even if it not being a standard it had been open and accessible for any computer technically sufficient to run it.

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