Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 12th Feb 2009 08:05 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
Novell's Miguel de Icaza has announced on his blog that Moonlight has hit the 1.0 milestone. Moonlight is the open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight technology, a framework similar to Adobe's Flash. Silverlight has already been used during the Olympic Games and President Obama's inauguration for streaming those events across the internet.
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Member since:
2005-07-27
To get an idea of what cost codecs might be developed and distributed for, visit these sites:
http://www.xiph.org/
http://diracvideo.org/
Zero euros per machine. That is what it CAN cost ordinary people.
"
Neither xiph or diract can play back the media that is being published with Silverlight.
If you do not mind not watching the videos published, then do not install the Microsoft Media Pack, and you will have a fully free plugin.
If your point is that we should support Diract and Ogg, we have no problem with that. We are an open source project and we are taking patches. We will be happy to integrate your code.
"It seems reasonable that Microsoft would choose to only distribute the codecs that they have licensed from MPEGLA and Fraunhofer for use in Moonlight and not to solve Linux's media problems for us.
It is "perfectly reasonable" only if you concede that Microsoft and others are money-grubbing mega-greedy-corporations that want to rip everybody off a great deal of money, many times more than what things are actually worth. You probably also need to admit that Microsoft wants to control what ordinary people can and cannot do with their own equipment, in the interests of ripping them off.
It is interesting also that you mention Euros ... software is not patentable in the EU. So what exactly is being charged for? "
In Europe software patents are just written as machine patents. Most patent law firms will get you your patent "translated" into machine form that is suitable for use in Europe.
A considerable number of the patents are held by European companies (see MPEGLA's web site for details on the owners and the patents).
But if you believe patents do not apply to you, then you can rebuild Moonlight with ffmpeg and avoid any binary blobs. It is supported out of the box.