For those of you who didn’t know, (now) President Obama’s inaugural speech was broadcast live across the Internet. The technology behind this massive amount of video distribution was Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, a browser-based technology that is similar to Flash – which is what websites like UTube use to allow people to play videos without actually having a copy of them on their computer.
Why is this interesting? Well, Silverlight is Microsoft technology, so of course it really only works on Microsoft’s web browser – Internet Explorer So what this means is you have to have payed a “Microsoft tax” by buying Windows or an “Apple tax” by buying OSX in order to hear the president’s speech. If you are running an open source operating system like Linux you can not use Silverlight, and thus theoretically could not participate in this historic event. Now I am sure you can understand why Microsoft would be interested in getting the government to use Silverlight.
Why did Obama’s team choose Silverlight? I’m not sure, but it certainly isn’t a great way to start off a revolution. Why should a US citizen need to pay to listen to the speech? This actually brings up another topic for another day – why I think government should be focusing on deploying Open Source software rather than proprietary, so that the citizens of the country are not beholden to a company to participate in the country’s affairs.
Anyhow, what I wanted to mention today was that there is an alternative to Silverlight, named Moonlight, that is being reverse-engineered with the aim to bring Silverlight compatability to the Linux operating system. However the version of Silverlight being used for the speech was not yet playable using Moonlight. Since it is a proprietary technology there really was nothing to be done … unless …
Microsoft to the rescue! At the last hour Microsoft employees pulled out all stops and hacked together a version of Moonlight with its Linux business partner Novell that would allow Linux users to watch the broadcast.
*phew*
Microsoft must really want us to listen to the speech, right?
Why does this feel like they’re trying to solve a problem they themselves have created and propagated?