@krisse: You do get some (a lot of) zealotry on forums, but I think the dislike for closed source software from actual Ubuntu developers probably stems from them being stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand they have users with pitchforks screaming "Why is flash broken on teh Ubuntuz?!" and on the other hand they have Adobe saying "Well, it's not really worth our time to look into that. Good luck!" Even if an Ubuntu dev had the technical knowledge to fix flash their hands are likely tied without access to the Adobe Flash source code. The flash plugin is basically a separate application that is embedded in the browser. It is the thing that draws pixels on your screen (or hangs uselessly, or doesn't play sound). In many cases there is just no way to work around its brokenness.

To sum it up: New Linux users often tend to be open source zealots just because they think it's cool. Long time Linux users are often heavily pro-open source because they got screwed over one too many times by proprietary software and were left to pick up the pieces themselves when the software vendor decided they didn't want to cater to the Linux using market.

Anyways, I'm curious what you would do in a situation like this. If you were a volunteer developer, stuck shipping broken commercial software, because "everyone needs it" with known problems that you had no way to fix, what would you say to users?

-John

PS: As for the actual point about flash, something is being done. People are working on an open source flash player.