Tim Dobson's Blog

For a long time getting people to use free software specifically, to move to a all free software desktop has been tricky.
Many people have been extremley unwilling to not have Adobe Flash installed on the machine they are using.
This software is of course proprietary software however many people feel that their daily dose of Youtube could not exist without it.

I find that not watching Youtube has saved me so much time and increased my productivity masses!

For many people, the best options for watching youtube have been using tools like youtube-dl, clive to get hold of the video files and then watch then in the likes of VLC.
More recently several people have written GUIs for these command line scripts in the form of PyTube and gvdown.
More information about youtube and video sharing sites can be found on linux.com
Another thing which uses flash is BBC Iplayer which some people seem to rely on to survive.

This is another thing you can benefit from by not having flash installed! ;)

Beebhack a wiki which opposes the DRM which iplayer uses and attempts to make it possible for users of free software to use iplayer.
The free software community noticed quite a while ago that there was no free software alternative to which plays flash files and started work to rectify this. After many people's long hard work, the result is Gnash.
Gnash is a free software implementation of Adobe Flash Player. It has been created totally from reverse engineering due Adobe's draconian NDA relating to the flash player specs.
Gnash works on many flash files on the internet - though it's not a complete implementation - when I tested it on miniclip.com most of the games worked fine.
Recently Gnash has been working on video sites and I am pleased to report that I have encountered Gnash working on youtube:

The problems relating to free software and flash are far from complete, however, Gnash and the various video download scripts are really helping in this respect.
I just which that there was a free software flash killer technology...