Idea for expanded support of some non-free software

[thully at umich.edu]

I see that many of these programs can't be distributed - I've been saying that
for the last few posts.  I accept that, and I feel that they are doing what
they can considering what I've heard about these licensing issues from this
thread (I thought MP3 playback could be distributed, for example, since many
free distributions do distribute it - just not MP3 encoding software).

At this point, I'm mostly just requesting that Ubuntu try to ensure that these
packages work well - and I see this not happening in the case of Flash, with
the sound server issue.  The same version of Flash (7.0.25) worked fine with
Warty, but a change in Hoary broke Flash's sound (note that Flash is the same
version, only free packages were updated).

Because this is not the fault of Flash but Gnome's sound server, it seems like
this is a reasonable issue to investigate.  Desktop users will expect that if
they go to a web page in Firefox and install Flash when prompted, sound will
work - and if it doesn't, it seems like it should be considered a bug in
Ubuntu.