Many competing music players play AAC without DRM these days, and according to Apple's own data, the overwhelming majority of music on people's iPods does not come from the iTunes music store, which is pretty much the only place that you might get AAC + Fairplay tracks. Well, there's a big reason that no one ever pursues this: it's a non-starter. The only semi-possible charge related to antitrust law that has ever been levied against Apple is with regards to their Fairplay DRM, which is only available on the iPod, and which allegedly causes vendor lock-in. That doesn't mean the dominant player has a monopoly, and even if it they did, it doesn't mean they obtained that monopoly unfairly or that they're abusing their monopoly to fix prices. But hey, newsflash: most markets have a dominant player. Companies like Creative, iRiver, and countless other small no-name brands from China manage to remain profitable, although their volumes are somewhat lower than Apple's. The barriers to entry in the digital music player market are extremely low, and there is nothing whatsoever about Apple's dominance that changes that. People in the US don't seem to buy them much, but they most certainly are available. There are literally thousands of competitive offerings, with the same feature set as the iPod, many of them technically superior in pretty much every way to the iPod, that are cheaper to boot.
And it isn't like the only alternative is Microsoft's Zune or some other non-profitable offering subsidized by a powerful company trying to break into the market, either. Yes, it is by far and away the most popular digital music player on the market today, but it is not the only one. This seems to be very difficult for some Slashdotters to grasp. With regards to Apple - and for the record, I am not a fanboy, I don't own an iPod and I run Debian on my Thinkpad - there is very little evidence that they have a monopoly anywhere at all. If, however, you use your monopoly position to create barriers to entry into the market (other than the natural barriers caused by competition) or if you use your monopoly in one market to unfairly compete in another market, you may be subject to antitrust law. If by fair competition you become the only player on the block, you are not subject to antitrust law. Antitrust law, broadly speaking, has to do with monopolies that are unfairly leveraged, with oligopolies that collude to set prices, and with mergers and acquisitions that consolidate the only major players in a market into one, dominant player.įirst off, despite what you may have heard, in the US at least, monopolies are not illegal. It seems lots of people think "antitrust" means any sort of subjectively "unfair" market manipulation, but that's not what it means. You don't seem to understand what "antitrust" means - and unfortunately, you're not alone in this here on Slashdot. (By the way, a codec developer who uses the term "video experience" to describe a container format/video codec? Microsoft's PR department must make some really good Kool-Aid!) After all, ActiveX has done what Silverlight does now for quite a while, if the user was ready to accept the security issues.
This is not supposed to be an "fulfill my unreasonable demands or else!1" flame, but really, Adobe has set a certain standard for interoperability and if Silverlight doesn't live up to that standard it's yet another Windows-only technology that no sane web developer will use because Flash does the same on more platforms. Given that you even have Silverlight for all three major platforms, that is.
FFMpeg's WMV3 functionality) doesn't quite cut it unless you can guarantee that FFmpeg is 100.00% compatible.
#LINUX SILVERLIGHT DOWNLOAD CODE#
After all, if you want to compete with Flash you have to offer all dependencies from one source telling users to use Google's reverse engineered code (ie.
#LINUX SILVERLIGHT DOWNLOAD WINDOWS#
While Windows Media has been shipping for years, I don't really think you have an official distribution of the latest codec for Linux and MacOS - unlike Adobe, who offer Flash 9 for all major platforms. unless you happen to not run Windows, of course.