Like all conspiracy stories, I particularly am intrigued by the idea that perhaps the moonlight tool (that emulates the flash-like proprietary silverlight rich media player from Microsoft), is a means for Microvell to insert their dubious software patents into Linux. Any comments from MS Singapore?
While I am not a great fan of proprietary formats, fact is much of today’s media are in closed formats. Many persuasive and passionate arguments have been made for and against, but less noise have been heard arguing against more “established” formats like Flash, MP3, rm etc.
One gets the feeling that Moonlight/Silverlight gets the most heat because it is from Novell and MS.
Until there is a viable FOSS solution for streaming media with equivalent quality like what Flash, Windows Media or Real Player is doing now, Linux users will still need to install plugins to support said media formats.
Freedom is precious thing. But Moonlight is not illegal in any way. Isn’t Moonlight open source? Would we prefer to use a reverse engineered codec?
If the argument is that it support MS codecs, OO.o also supports MS Office documents. Should we boycott it? What about Samba?
Just my 2 cents.
OO.o had to reverse engineer the formats. Because of EU fines, MS has opened up and published their proprietary formats. M$ bought votes to favour the broken OOXML to become an ISO standard. Yes, it is about not using anything from a convicted monopolist.
There are plenty of viable audio and video and streaming technologies in the open source space. The fact that people are not using it massively is because of how M$ bamboozles OEMs to preload machines with windows which then helps to perpetuate a drug-like dependence.
Thanks for your 2 cents. I return it with interest!
I know about the OOXML fiasco by MS, but sad to say, that’s capitalism. Unless there is a global socialist economic system in place, any given for-profit company with sufficient clout and money will do the same in a heart beat. After all MS Office is their cash cow.
OEMs bundling Windows it’s due to the demand for it. We can argue that it perpetuates a dependence and stuff but any one vendor who wishes to sell his ware will need to do that. And it is not due to the fact that MS forcing any one streaming tech on anyone. Everyone knows Flash is top dogs nowadays thanks to sites like Youtube. Granted Linux is making inroads into PC/Notebook market, most people just wants Windows not because it runs the stuff they want to run e.g. games especially. The OS is actually an afterthought.
No point being a purist and all, most if not all of OSS people do MP3s and many use MSN/Yahoo Networks for chats. And do you watch DVDs with DCSS encryption or would you just watch those without encryption?
I totally agree with you that this is a sad affair of things but what I was saying was, why be selective over one proprietary format over another?
While you may not agree to others doing Windows format, have you considered that sometimes in an ocean of Windows people we have to sadly fit in?