I've been having problems with Firefox on Ubuntu turning black and white now and again. From what I've read this seems to be related to Flash sites, some graphics cards can't run them properly in Ubuntu so they reduce the number of colours. However, it's not a huge problem, and it isn't what I wanted to talk about in this thread.

Here's the main topic: what fascinated me was what people were saying about this problem on Ubuntu-related forums I searched.

An awful lot of messages about this bug were along the lines of "Flash is proprietary software, we don't deal with that" or "It's Adobe's problem" or even "Flash is the cancer of the web"!

Is this kind of attitude really going to help Ubuntu and Linux spread into the mass market and replace Windows?

Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with the ideal that open standards are much better for everyone in the long run, but there has to be a measure of pragmatism alongside such idealism. The bottom line is that if Ubuntu can't run Flash sites as well as Windows, even when they're using the same Firefox browser, then people will be encouraged to stick with Windows.

And another home truth: In theory Adobe should fix this, but considering how small Ubuntu's market share is, are they really likely to give this priority? As a commercial company they're probably not going to do anything about it, so the most realistic way to fix things is for Ubuntu to deal with whatever quirks Flash contains.

I really really want to see people switching from Windows to Linux, but one of the things holding this back seems to be an irrational hatred of anything proprietary.

For Linux to succeed it has to be used by people who neither know nor care about open source software, and those kinds of people will be put off using Linux if they see Windows doing things better (such as handling Flash websites properly).