The Problem

See now even if Microsoft come out with useful technology that really moves the industry forwards in some way... there are a whole load of people who are never going to be able to trust them enough to use it, myself included.

As for videos, considering that the Moonlight project has got videos working with ffmpeg (LGPL) and in doing so has enabled Silverlight to play a whole host of different video types; but is prevented from releasing the code that integrates with ffmpeg because of the agreement with Microsoft. Apparently Moonlight can not push changes upstream to Silverlight and Microsoft only want windows media formats and mp3 supported in Silverlight.

Once you've dug deeper in a Microsoft story you can always smell the bovine droppings somewhere and I believe I will be pushing MOTU against using Mono based projects in default Ubuntu installs as it just seems too risky these days to be involved in Microsoft technology without some kind of anti-lawyer suite.