Dr. Matt Lee (mattl)

Microsoft/Novell Collaboration on Silverlight.

Microsoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to users of Moonlight from their web site. The codecs will be binary codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a web browser (sorry, those are the rules for the Media codecs[1]).

My questions…

1. How is this a good thing? Introducing proprietary software into the free software desktop…
2. What license will this be released under?

And yet, I bet dozens of people who claim to care about free software will install this, praise Novell and Microsoft for it, and advocate its usage. The same people who run Flash, Skype and Win32Codecs.
Of course, they don’t care about free software, but it’s trendy to pretend that you do. That’s why they occasionally refer to it as ‘open source’ and why they still refuse to accept the fact that Linux is but a kernel.
Anyway, moving on…
Also, esr writes ‘My resolve to treat Microsoft like any another license submitter is being sorely tested‘  on the OSI blog.