“The Mono Project releases the first preview of Moonlight 3.0, giving application developers a first look at the open-source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 technology for the Linux platform.” Sadly, it’s still Firefox-only.
“The Mono Project releases the first preview of Moonlight 3.0, giving application developers a first look at the open-source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 technology for the Linux platform.” Sadly, it’s still Firefox-only.
Reading through the comments it appears there will be a plugin infrastructure which will hopefully translate to the ability of being able to installing the ffmpeg plugin when required for playback of CODECs not supplied by the Moonlight developers.
The only downside as far as I see is a complete lack of development tools that are equal to the quality which Microsoft is providing which unfortunately translates that any development will still be occurring on Windows computers.
I like Silverlight, and I’d like it being adopted on as many platforms as possible, thus Mono’s efforts on this project is welcome for me.
However, while Silverlight 3 is nice, and has very cool features, I fear the chain will be broken with the fourth version. Unlike previous iterations, where it only relied on .net technology (plus some video codecs, and GPU acceleration), the fourth iteration has strong Windows tie-ins (like directly hosting internet explorer or access to COM objects).
Frankly I don’t think even Microsoft will be able to pull off a proper port of their own Mac OS version.
Still, I’m still keeping the slight hope…
And why would they? Silverlight has always been a second-grade citizen on anything other than Microsofts own (recent) platforms.
The main reason for Silverlights existence is to maintain the tie-in to Microsofts platform and technologies. It’s all to be expected.
Microsoft is not one single monolithic entity. They have different groups with different views, and the main .net web group consists of mostly open source friendly guys (like ScottGu).
In the past they lobbied (inside Microsoft) for more openness. And we’ve seen some results (like Asp.Net Mvc, MS-PL license, .net openness pledge, etc).
That’s why, although small, I still have some amount of hope.
Yes, and that is the same for all bigger companies. However, that does not change their overall company vision / strategy, regardless of how “open source friendly” some employees in one minor division is. They don’t set the rules.
“You can put lipstick on a pig, …”.
I’d love to be wrong – but unlike you, I don’t have high hopes. Let’s hope you’re right and I’m wrong.
Edited 2010-02-06 01:44 UTC
Really? You really want a Microsoft-dominated web? You want ActiveX all over again?
I’m glad the Silverlight team in MS seems to at least genuinely working with the foss community, at least for now. Thing is, I don’t trust Microsoft’s management not to try something nasty once Silverlight/Moonlight have gotten extremely pervasive. They want to get you hooked, then they’ll haul in the line hard once enough people have bitten. Fortunately, it’s not being adopted nearly as fast as Microsoft was probably hoping it would be.
Only parts of .NET and of Silverlight are partly “open”.
Other parts of each technology are strictly closed, proprietary and patented.
It is a classic “bait and switch”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_and_switch
Have nothing to do with either technology.
Calling the moonlight project “adoption” is a bit of a stretch, since it seems pretty much everybody is avoiding it like a plague.
COM support is the least of the problems with Silverlight. It actually makes sense to expose them to the runtime, because some people just need it to make the jump to Silverlight.
It doesn’t make Silverlight any less appealing to non-microsoft crowd, which doesn’t care about the technology in the first place.
My only interest in Moonlight (and Mono) is getting Netflix “watch it now” working native on Linux. Since the proprietary DRM feature in Silverlight hasn’t been (and likely never will be) implemented in Moonlight we Linux folks are out of luck. It’s sad really, as many, many Linux users are those who use a Linux box as a media center. If Microsoft were truly interested in playing nice and interoperability with other OSs it would find a way to implement Silverlight properly on other platforms.
And I doubt you’ll ever see that component of it, at least not in Moonlight. Remember, Moonlight is not a Microsoft project to port Silverlight–if it was, it would be called Silverlight. In the foss world, implementing DRM is a big no-no.
That’s not to say Microsoft themselves couldn’t provide a binary plugin to handle it, of course. But it’ll never be in Moonlight core and, going without saying, would be limited to the platforms Microsoft chose to support.
Computing gets more and more mobile, and memory, processor cycles and diskspace are once again issues that need to be addressed. The Silver/Moonlight plugin is not the right way to go.
Not because I don’t like or trust Microsoft, but because HTML5, Javascript, SVG will be able to do similar things, if not now, so in a very near future. This will be built in functionality in the browser of your next mobile phone, if it isn’t already. Duplicating the functionality will cost memory space, processor cycles and battery life that can be better used for other purposes.
Today we need a web that works well both on the desktop and mobile devices. Developing different pages for different platforms just increases the development costs.