Watch the Obama Inauguration With Moonlight
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."
And we thought all MS Engineers were evil. My hope in humanity has been restored.
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.