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I don't know, I don't trust Microsoft any more then the next guy, but then again, in this case they may need as much support as they can get in order to compete with Adobe and in this case it may be to Microsoft's benefit to help the Free Software comunity with an implementation, for all of the issues people have with Mono, this could be a huge improvement on Adobe's closed source x86-only flash player. I think it is far better that the Linux comunity is in on this action than sitting on the sideline rooting for Adobe. A bit of competition wouldn't hurt anybody.

True - given the state of flash on the platforms, and the lack of support for certain platforms (FreeBSD, Linux on PPC, SPARC etc) - I want to see Adobe step up to the plate and stop treating their customers like trash.

I mean, Microsoft won't provide a client, but if they at least provide assistance, its a damn site more than the lack-there-of of assistance that Adobe provides to gnuash.

Ultimately I hope Microsoft realises that those who don't run Windows don't necessarily hate Microsoft - and as such, are happy to purchase services from Microsoft.

Ultimately I hope that Microsoft realizes that they should just start hacking on Mono/Moonlight. It's a development framework that faces serious competition from Java/JavaFX and Flash. They need to make it ubiquitous, and they need to be make it cross-platform.

What does Microsoft get out of having their own proprietary implementation? They don't sell it. They don't want to keep it to themselves. They just want developers to use it. Sounds like a job for free software. <queue theme music>

Sounds like a good idea - if I were CEO of Microsoft (everyones favourite parlour game), I would completely open and standardise the .NET framework, allow anyone to implement it - create tools that are 100% .NET to allow it to run on other platforms.

We need more choice; right now Flash is the only thing- everyone gets screwed, and no one benefits from that monopoly.

Sun also need to get their act together; create easy to use development tools for JavaFX so that the cafe late drinking set who are fluent in Photoshop can sit down and put together a rich internet experience with minimum effort and learning.

MS is always big on mindshare. The best silverlight tools will always be on windows, they sell the tools and sell the platform.

Just out of curiosity, have you actually seen silverlight?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsNRFKsGLbA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEUrQEj6Sd4&mode=related&sea...

It completely destroys flash when it comes to rich application design in a web browser. JavaFX (and apollo from adobe, which you didnt mention) Are a similar idea, but for the desktop. Whether those take off or not is anyones guess, as it would be a new way off looking at desktop application development. But Silverlight is the first truely elegant solution I have seen to the web application problem. I would still use flash for animations, but that is about it. From rich application functionality to content delivery, Silverlight is on a whole other playing field.

Not to start a flame war or anything, but we were just arguing about this in another thread like, yesterday, so I wanted to point out that it is the MS/Novell deal that makes the port to linux a reality. Patent indemnification aside, the deal is what will allow linux users access to something which is quite likely to really take off in the next few years.

"They don't sell it."

Products developed on top of the .Net framework sell Windows licenses though. So in the end it actually does lead to direct sales, which is why they'll never officially support .Net on any other platform...in essence it would be a public admission undermining their own platform which doesn't make any sense from a business standpoint.

What are you talking about?!
Even the ones using Windows mostly hate Microsoft more than the ones not using Windows.

Adobe more or less sucks but at least they provided flash for Linux.

Adobe more or less sucks but at least they provided flash for Linux
Flash9 doesn't work neither on my AMD64 nor PS3 Linux setups. I hate MS, but i wish them luck with silverlight.

Moonlight is free software. We can redistribute it freely. We can fork it. We can study it. We can add cool functionality. That makes it different from Flash or any other proprietary development framework available for Linux.

Some parts of Mono are perhaps questionable. But these parts are contained, and the rest is simply the best high-level runtime we have in the free software arsenal. I'm not a fan of Novell or Microsoft as companies. But I like the free software implementation of Microsoft's rich Internet stack. It's more elegant and advanced than the Sun stack, and it shares more components with the Adobe stack.

The only other option is to get cracking on a purely home-grown solution. We have Parrot as a suitable starting point. It'll take a few years to get it to the point where Moonlight, JavaFX, and Flash are today.

... except for, of course, the standard for animation of web graphics, which is SVG and SMIL.

http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/animate.html
http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/SVGAnimations.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVG_animation

What's wrong with not going against a standard if you're willing to provide technical help on implementing your platform? If anything, it sounds like competition.

Why should established standards be the end of the road? That does nothing but stagnate innovation.

I don't have a problem with people implementing new things if they provide technical documentation or support.

Moonlight is open source, and like mentioned above it can be studied and improved.

The standards were created to go against propriatary platforms who provide no documentation or technical assistance.

Keyword: standard open format much like Open Document Format or even HTML where anyone from Closed to Open source can compete on an equal field.

Is it really competition if it is going to be force-fed via Windows Update to all Windows boxes?

Here is a set of links which explain the reasons for having independent web standards, as opposed to competing commercial *cough* "standards".

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/
http://www.w3.org/2001/di/
http://www.w3.org/2001/di/#waDI
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/#sec-Licensing

Edited 2007-08-10 11:41

Why should established standards be the end of the road? That does nothing but stagnate innovation.


Because standards make interoperability better, and that lowers the cost to the user. Standards doesn't prevent anybody from doing new stuff, quite the contrary. People can still innovate to make software that is faster, less memory hungry, or easier to maintain and still stay standard compliant, and standards doesn't prevent anybody to invent things that not yet are standardized. Standards give developers the opportunity to stand on the sholders of others when they develop new things.

Another thing, standards evolve too. E.g. IPv4->IPv6, HTML2->HTML3->HTML4... Its just that they tend to evolve in a way where people are not left out. Sometimes even keeping up with the standard requires a lot of innovation. As far as I know there is not a single web browser that fully comply with all w3c standards. If such thing actually was created my guess is that the press would praise it as the most innovative thing since sliced bread.

In other words, doing standardized things in a standard way, gives more time to innovate things not yet standardized. Just imagine how much time web developers would save if all browsers used the same DOM tree structure, the same tags and attributes and fully support css...

yeah, that's right, you must be on the management team.

Let's just wait and see what happens, they haven't done anything to Mono yet, why would they do that with MoonLight? It's in their best interests to help it, especially since adobe tends to neglect the Linux port of Flash. Look how long it took them to update the flash plugin to version 9? they skipped 8 all together, and left us all in the lurch. MS would be smart to encourage MoonLight as much as possible.

Edited 2007-08-09 23:50

Perhaps you can explain the mechanism for this break? You have a piece of software on a server which gets downloaded to a Linux or Windows client to run in the browser. Now, there's a small update in one of the clients that somehow causes the other clients to break. How can this be? Are you saying that they'll make an update to the Windows client to suddenly DDoS all the linux clients or something?

Or do you just have no idea what you're talking about?

I think the idea is that Microsoft will update the Silverlight API/File Format and free implementations will lack this new functionality and no longer be compatible.

This is the "extend, extinguish" part of the embrace, extend, extinguish trifecta.

Existing software certainly won't break in this scenario. And if Linux or Mac compatibility is really important to the content-producers, then they won't use the new features until they're fully supported. Heck, those content producers have to also consider Windows users of the previous versions....

People who talk about EEE really don't understand backwards compatibility and likely don't really understand ABIs. You can't extend and extinguish something without providing compelling features. Otherwise no one would use those extensions. Or if the extended features aren't important in comparison to compatibility, then people will still use the base profile.

The whole EEE thing with Java was particularly funny: Sun made Java hard to interface with the native system for some reasons (they wanted to use Java to lift programs off the underlying OS so that they could shift people over to a SunOS). When Microsoft extended Java to make it easier to call into native Windows functionality and programs, Sun cried foul. Of course, a developer could easily see where their code was breaking portability and could isolate that code if they so chose and they could do all the same things (albeit inconveniently) with JNI. But then there was a cry of EEE.

What we had was Microsoft making something better in a way that the original authors did not want to (for strategic or political reasons). They got sued for it and people hate them for this. But they did embrace the original protocol or system, and their support for it would be unpopular if they did not support the baseline extant specification. The upshot is that you should adopt Microsoft's more popular extensions to your protocol if you want your implementation to survive. Why should it be any other way? If they're providing something that is compelling to their customers, it might be compelling to yours too.

Considering Moonlight is not made by microsoft, but engineered by Novell under the LGPL off of the ECMA specification, it doesn't really matter what Microsoft does or doesn't do, as Silverlight and Moonlight are two different implementations of the same standard. MS has put alot of money and man hours into making this a cross platform technology, it would be kind of odd for them to then throw that all away.

There's an ECMA specification for Silverlight?

"windows world with a small update to the windows version that breaks support for the other operatingsystems"

You mean just like what Adobe/Macromedia does with Flash?

"At least flash is implemented in compiled code."

If you are insinuating that Silverlight isn't compiled, then that's an incorrect assumption. From my experience thusfar, Silverlight apps are pretty light on resource consumption, certainly much lighter than their Java counterparts, and the runtime is tiny...just over 1 meg.

Its already been done! Silverlight for Windows Mobile. Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA3LlpClFko

There is a compact .NET framework designed to run on embedded devices: http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/netcf/

Perhaps a light version of Silverlight will be implemented to run on this!

... And they'll stop doing it the second flash dies.

- Gilboa

"However, I dont see Flash going anywhere soon, especially if it become Apples vs Apples when Flash 10 is released."

Here's the thing: There are already millions of .Net developers out there who could quite literally ramp up on Silverlight in a single weekend...the programming model is very familiar, plus they can use whatever managed language they are using today. This IMO gives Silverlight a huge advantage over Flash so it'll be very interesting to see where things are 2 years from now. I personally see Silverlight taking a huge chunk of the market away from Flash, maybe even as much as half of their marketshare within 2 years?

I have nothing to back this up with, just a gut feeling given the current (very positive) response to Silverlight.

Read butters post

Moonlight compiled and worked as advertised on my Debian machine. I just followed install instructions.

You're kidding, right?

Some of you people sound like domestic abuse victims: you'll take a beating for years, but forgive at the first sign of attention. Do you honestly, really think that Microsoft has miraculously changed their ways this time? They honestly don't understand the premise behind open source and open standards. This is just one of many strategies they're deploying to grab some more turf from a competitor and fatten their wallets. If they get a little PR in the process, great, but don't convince yourselves that they're doing this for cooperation, standards or especially the long haul. They've got a pretty good record of being nice one minute and mean the next 10 years. Whatever it takes to get a little market share.

Also, how could Microsoft possibly be better than Adobe on this front? If Adobe is a "late-to-party player" (having released Flash years ago and [partially] opened PDF and XMP... the only worthwhile formats and "standards" they own), then what does that make the company that's never released an application for -- or cooperated with -- the open source community? These guys have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the interoperability table at every turn. You'd have to have the memory of a goldfish to believe that Microsoft is the better party in all this.

Excuse me if I'm just a little more cynical and cautious. Until Microsoft releases a blanket statement indemnifying all distributors and users of its .NET runtime (and its derivatives, clones, interfaces, and clients) against legal action or retribution of any kind, I can't trust them.

I just keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"Some of you people sound like domestic abuse victims"

Yet other sound like the kind of people who wear tinfoil hats and think the moonlanding was fake.

"never released an application for -- or cooperated with -- the open source community?"

Ajax.
Microsoft has also contributed a lot to other open standards like DAV.