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Watch the Obama Inauguration With Moonlight

Posted by timothy on from the join-this-program-already-in-progress dept.

bigmonachus writes "Miguel de Icaza has posted on his blog that linux users will be able to watch the Obama inauguration using Moonlight. Just go to the Moonlight download page to get it. He also said that some Microsoft engineers worked hard last night to make this happen."

4 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. A point for MS by uberhipduck · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And we thought all MS Engineers were evil. My hope in humanity has been restored.

  2. The best way to watch the inauguration by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I was on the National Mall for Bill Clinton's second inauguration, so let me suggest that the absolute best way to watch the Presidential inauguration is to watch it on the news that evening.

    They'll cut out all the boring crap. You don't have to spend all morning standing around in the freezing cold. And you don't have to miss work.

  3. Re:Or not by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I suppose that this, codeplex and their other efforts could be all a big plot to win mindshare from OSS developers and users and convert them to MS, then they'll break compatibility again, but really if they think that will succeed, they're living in a fairy tale world.

    Really? I see their Silverlight/moonlight cooperation as being the same strategy of DirectX/Internet Explorer, as a second chance to try and take over the Web once and for all.

    I'm never installing anything from Microsoft again. And if your website requires it, you just lost a customer.

  4. Re:Or not by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, the main reason the free flash implementations are lagging, is that they have been reverse engineering the format, unlike the Moonlight people, who have specs to work from.

    There were specs for Flash too, but until very recently, the license for those specs specifically forbid using them to implement a viewer.

    Because of this, even though flash player is the most crappy piece of software I've ever seen on any Linux machine, the free alternatives still haven't been able to beat it.

    So yes, Microsoft has been more open. Not just more open, but so much more open that they ended up forcing Adobe to become more open. Competition
    for the flash format is good, and Adobe opening up the specs after Silverlight appeared is proof of this.