Everyone who has been anxiously awaiting a peek at Adobe’s Flash Player 9 for Linux will have to wait until a well-scrubbed beta release becomes available.
Yes, we do plan to release a beta version in advance of the final version. However, it will be a beta in the classical software engineering sense– i.e., a version that we believe to be largely bug-free and submitted to the users in the hopes that the last of the bugs will be found and reported.
Dropping an alpha release on the Linux community would likely yield tons of bug reports from those users. Adobe knows about a lot of those bugs, and Melanson said, “Processing such redundant reports would not necessarily be the most industrious use of our time.”
Adobe has at times been accused of being less than sensitive to the requests of Linux users, and Melanson’s post drew forth responses from some of the critics. One commenter responded to the bug-reporting concerns by wondering why software bugs are such a concern for Adobe now, with Flash Player 7 having been a less-than-perfect product itself:
Adobe doesn’t seem at all concerned that we have been using this buggy software for ages, but now we are supposed to believe they are concerned about exposing us to bugs in an alpha of Flash 9?
If Adobe is worried about too many bug reports, then make it clear that you aren’t accepting bug reports. It’s clear to us that Adobe is hell bent against getting any help from the community (even if it’s just bug reporting) so this isn’t much of a surprise.
Melanson has been keeping up with postings to the Penguin.SWF blog, and tracking progress he has seen with Flash Player 9. It is too early to judge the kind of job Melanson and the Adobe team will do with the project, even if patience is wearing thin among the product’s Linux userbase.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
