Boxee uses the adobe flash plugin for firefox already. Unfortunately, the loader application they use which interfaces between Boxee and the flash plugin is closed source. That's right: They took a completely open piece of software (XBMC) and added extras to it that were closed off. They get away with this by making it a separate app so that there's some semblance of separation. This should be a lesson to them: Close stuff off to try and get on the good side of content providers, and get screwed over. If they'd opened it up from the start, in the spirit of the codebase on which they rely, we wouldn't be in this situation, as the horse has bolted. As it is now, Boxee will likely still work with Hulu - it'll be switched off in a trivial manner from within the boxee codebase. Unfortunately, I suspect building boxee from source is a non-trivial exercise, given that it's not really an opensource project.

Depending on how Play On operates it may be affected by this as well. If it operates the same as Boxee did (basically using the firefox flash plugin) then it'll probably still work just fine. Boxee will likely still work just fine as well - they're taking it out because they're in the uncomfortable position of having to bend over backwards to the content providers. Boxee could have avoided all of this by simply remaining completely opensource. The code would have still been available to anyone to use. Unfortunately they decided to close this off, and now not only are they bitten by this, but there users are as well. The same will happen to Plex unless they open their codebase up. They've complained about the fact that Boxee's flash implementation wasn't open - let's see whether there's is (the Media Server thing they have certainly isn't open). I'll stick with completely open software thanks very much.

Where is this "trashing of reputation"? Seems to me all this "Cyberace1/Gamester" fellow (who appears to be a project manager, rather than a "core developer") was clarifying the OP's comments WRT the origins of Plex. There was no "trashing of reputation" in his post, rather a misspelling of Elan's surname. Nice spin attempt though.