Whatever you might want to say about Microsoft calling Silverlight “crossplatform” and not making a version for Linux, you have to give them credit for what they did leading up to Obama’s inauguraiton.

Basically, they worked with Novell to improve Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Silverlight for Linux, to the point where Linux users could watch the inauguration.  While I was away from my own computer during the inauguraiton and had to suffer through an audio stream from Fox poorly synced with a jerky video stream from CNN, commenters appear to be reporting that everything worked just fine in the end for Linux users. We should give a lot of credit to Microsoft for caring that all operating systems were compatible with the live stream.

Ultimately, though, it was the right thing to do not just because of the good PR, but also for the Silverlight standard. Standards are standard because they are well-supported by the major players. Even if Linux can’t compare to Windows in market share numbers, Silverlight has a much better chance if it is well supported on Linux. If Microsoft chooses to do this by supporting an open implementation of Silverlight, that is even better.

It is really impressive and, quite frankly, suprising that Microsoft went to the effort of supporting an open-source implementation of their standard. This is certainly a move in the right direction for Microsoft.

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