what about windows media support? [LWN.net]

what about windows media support?

Posted Sep 7, 2007 3:22 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989)
In reply to: what about windows media support? by tetromino
Parent article: Microsoft delivers Silverlight 1.0, extends support to Linux

This may be an interesting one to watch, in those few moments one allots to Redmond watching.
If MS has their Silverlight codebase, and allows GPL releases via a Novell proxy, one wonders how this would work.
Contributions made to the GPL flavor can't be reflected back into another copy of the tree under an odious license, unless they have some additional magic clause (IANAL).
I predict either a) shrill cries from all corners, or b) the whole project pulls a Bob.
Kinda hope the latter. The market seems to finally be growing some sack in the light of OOXML.

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what about windows media support?

Posted Sep 7, 2007 14:13 UTC (Fri) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

Simple: Novell, like other corporate sponsors, would likely require copyright assignment to your contribution (or merely joint-copyright, which does the trick as well).

As part of the deal that lets them access the required Microsoft info, they are probably required to share improvements back as well.

I guess the picture could have been worse. The product is likely still quite far off, in the meantime, we have a club to prod Adobe with. x86_64 support, and stop stifling third-party reimplementations!

what about windows media support?

Posted Sep 7, 2007 14:47 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Microsoft in this case is, indeed, doing better then Adobe.

Adobe's client is closed source. They are not helping with open source alternatives.

Meanwhile Microsoft is helping out with open source alternatives.. ie acknowledging and assisting them in whatever way.

Both things are dependant on closed source and otherwise patented codecs for media...

So unless Adobe plans to help out with Gnash anytime soon I'd have to say that Microsoft Silverlight is better then Adobe Flash already.

Not that I expect Silverlight to go anywere.