With Barack Obama as the US president, it looks like a change has certainly come. According to a report Microsoft apparently worked late night together with Novell's Mono and Moonlight developers on January 19 to enable Linux desktop users to view the US presidential inauguration on Moonlight-the open source alternative to Silverlight.

The US presidential inauguration committee apparently had chosen Silverlight to broadcast the inauguration events over the Internet on January 20. Considering the software only supports Windows and Mac, with the FOSS alternative Moonlight not ready yet to support the live Webcast (as initially admitted by Moonlight chief, Miguel de Icaza), it obviously attracted the flack-of the Linux and other FOSS OS users.

However, a surprise came early on the morning ofJanuary 20. de Icaza wrote in his blog [tirania. orglbloglarchive/2009/Jan-20.htm[j: "I just wanted to confirm that you can watch today's Barack Obama Official Inauguration video stream using Moonlight on Linux/x86 and Linux/ x86-64 systems. All you need to do is to go to the Moonlight Download page ... Microsoft worked late last night to get us access to the code that will be used during the inauguration so we could test it with Moonlight."

Looks like the two are in fact working on interoperability. But wouldn't it have been better if pic2009.org had chosen a software/ technology that's universally available so none of these issues would have cropped up at the final moments? Or at least, MS and Novell could have collaborated in advance to avoid keeping the FOSS OS users waiting till the last moment.