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Flash supports DRM out of the box, and Silverlight has several features that make it better than Flash. Even its open-source implementation is better.

How about contributing to some cross-platform .Net development in the form of Mono? http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:Runtime

I want HTML5 to die and Silverlight to live.

HTML was never designed to be a web application infrastructure and all the hacks in the world will never make it so. It just gets worse and more convoluted with each release.

Why would I want WPF on my Unix?
Oh wait, I can't run it!
It says my OS is not supported.
Give me HTML or give me death.

The Mono WPF page heavily implies that Moonlight implements "a subset of WPF."
Moonlight 2 isn't even a month old at this point.

So, ignoring your WPF Straw Man, it certainly sounds like Silverlight works on Linux at the very least. I wouldn't be surprised if it works on other OS X/11 or X.org implementations as well.

Note: I'm playing Devil's Advocate here; I actually think Silverlight is a complete waste of time.

I want HTML5 to die and Silverlight to live.

HTML was never designed to be a web application infrastructure and all the hacks in the world will never make it so. It just gets worse and more convoluted with each release.

Why would I want WPF on my Unix?
Oh wait, I can't run it!
It says my OS is not supported.
Give me HTML or give me death.

The Mono WPF page heavily implies that Moonlight implements "a subset of WPF."
Moonlight 2 isn't even a month old at this point.

So, ignoring your WPF Straw Man, it certainly sounds like Silverlight works on Linux at the very least. I wouldn't be surprised if it works on other OS X/11 or X.org implementations as well.

Note: I'm playing Devil's Advocate here; I actually think Silverlight is a complete waste of time.

I started programming at a very young age. Similar to you, I started with BASIC (Atari 800 for me) and moved to Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, C++, JAVA, C#... and somewhere along the way I picked up FORTRAN. For a young man around 12 years old, I would suggest an interpreted language that would quick show the cause and effect of what has happened.

I know how much Slashdot love MS, but there's this:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

The Mono project is also very awesome:
http://www.mono-project.com/VisualBasic.NET_support

Last but not least, jump right into JAVA with NetBeans. The IDE (although bloated) holds your hand through a lot of things.

If there's a struggle with understanding, then good ol' HTML is a quick way to see results. After all, the 'Hello World' and making your name appear on the screen in different colors and blinking is very exciting when you're young!

Nevertheless, the .NET platform relies upon certain libraries and interfaces.

Which ones?

All of them! I guess you could look here and see which ones Mono still lacks...

Though I would say, since .NET is a bit of a fresh start, the problem of replicating its libraries probably isn't as complicated as replicating all the stuff WINE needed to replicate... (It seems that way. I only say "probably" because I don't know.)

The ECMA standards cover the C# language and the CLR runtime - and, from what I understand, precious little else. The interfaces are known but things like Windows Forms and Silverlight have to be re-implemented for other platforms (i.e. Mono) if people want support for it outside Windows. If you think I'm wrong on this point, please feel free to elaborate. Provide some information if you've got it.

But in any case, I don't see what this has to do with my point - which was that .NET serves as Microsoft's exit strategy from IA-32 dependence. I believe that Microsoft is letting enough of .NET loose to encourage wider adoption, while keeping enough of it to themselves that they can act as gatekeepers for the platform. But even if they really are completely open with the platform: that doesn't change the fact that its existence provides Microsoft with a way to move their developers, and eventually their users, off of IA-32 code. I don't even understand why that would be a contentious idea.

Not really, but the point of a standard is you don't need anyone's endorsement to implement it.

Serious question: What platform(s) does the CLI target? Today, in that, I can use?

Microsoft's implementation, .NET, is available for Windows (x86, x64, IA64). That's the full version. There are also watered down versions (Compact Framework, Micro Framework, XNA, Silverlight) for other platforms, but I'll ignore those.

Mono is available for Linux, OS X, iPhone, Solaris, OpenBSD/NetBSD/FreeBSD, Wii, PS3, and even Windows. Officially supported architectures are x86, x64, IA64, ARM (little-endian), PowerPC, s390, and SPARC (32). Unofficial support is also there for Alpha, MIPS, ARM (big-endian), and HPPA.

Why? Silverlight is much faster than Flash, and it crashes far less. I have used Netflix streaming with Silverlight, and I must say that I strongly prefer it to Flash.

Flash is somewhat multiplatform. For Silverlight 2.0 on other platforms, there is always Moonlight. I have never used it, but I have no need to use it either.

That isn't limited to a proprietary implementation.

Moonlight. From the same folks who brought you Mono (and sharing much of the code), Moonlight is a free, open-source implementation of Silverlight runnable on Linux, *BSD, and so forth. It's under pretty heavy development, and like Mono itself tends to lag somewhat behind the MS version (unsurprisingly), but it's usable for many of the things that require Silverlight.

Download link (may also be in repositories): http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/
Download for development version (2 beta 8): http://go-mono.com/moonlight-beta/
Project page (including links to source): http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

Mono isn't a clone of .NET and it was never meant to be.

That certainly explains why Mono's main page refers to itself as 'an open source .NET development framework'... oh wait...

Mono has no need for things like WPF and other Windows-specific libraries.

And that certainly explains why Mono's technologies page has that 3rd column entitled 'Microsoft-compatible stack'... oh wait...

Mono isn't a clone of .NET and it was never meant to be.

That certainly explains why Mono's main page refers to itself as 'an open source .NET development framework'... oh wait...

Mono has no need for things like WPF and other Windows-specific libraries.

And that certainly explains why Mono's technologies page has that 3rd column entitled 'Microsoft-compatible stack'... oh wait...

See MoMA, there are a number of 3/3.5 features. If you aren't using WPF/Silverlight there's a pretty good chance your ERP solution could be easily migrated.

There's already a Mono compiler for the iPhone - it simply doesn't run in a VM at runtime, but is statically compiled beforehand. Apple doesn't care how the binary you submit was produced.

I personally don't think it's a good idea to use bridge techniques like this just because you are familiar with a language, you will always lose out over truly learning the native platform.

One other thing of note is the Unity game development framework that lets you write game behavior login in either Javascript or C#.

Its their technology, and I think .NET is a windows only thing.

You think wrong.

JVM is CPU independent.
CLR is LANGUAGE independent.

It may come as a surprise, but JVM is also "language independent" (whatever the hell that even means for a bytecode VM!) - ever heard of Scala, Clojure, Jython, JRuby, SISC, Armed Bear LISP?

CLR is actually a specification, with numerous implementations, but the latter are also CPU independent (again, a surprise for a bytecode loading runtime, eh?) - .NET runs on x86/x64/IA64, a port exists on XBox 360 (for XNA) that runs on PowerPC, and then there's Mono which covers quite a bunch - Alpha, ARM, MIPS, SPARC.

Or did you think that raw pointers are not platform and architecture independent? C programmers would be very surprised to hear that.

Try Mono http://www.mono-project.com/

Recently, Mono was ported to Apple iPhone claiming to carry Apple requirements. That is "almost" .NET for iPhone, a framework which has nothing to do with Cocoa and if you ask me, it is the perfect trojan of MS for iPhone.
http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:Iphone

If Apple says "but this is workaround", they will simply show dozens of .NET apps ported via Mono. Also Novell has a little to harm Apple on Pro Desktop but Adobe can do real evil things without Apple able to do anything against it. They can say "We have problems with almost zero backwards compatibility with Apple operating systems, we are giving up OS X to focus on Windows and we may release some of our professional apps to Linux." Apple's "this depreciated, this gone, carbon? no 64bit" really cost them millions already and they are taking the flames, PR disasters when they have to say "no 64bit yet". Apple changed their mind about 64bit carbon (non existence) in 1 day, announced it on some basic event requiring millions of lines to be rewritten in Cocoa. I am really surprised Trolltech/Nokia (Qt) could move to Cocoa that fast to get 64bit support, that framework is the reason why Skype/Google earth can ship in sync on OS X. It is not just KDE.

Presumably, if Adobe doesn't establish Flash as a cross-platform dev environment for mobiles, then Microsoft will manage to foist Silverlight as it's own bloated slow lane for mobile devices. And the same devs that give us IE-only web apps will start producing Silverlight-only stuff for mobiles.

Not really analogous. IE is proprietary, but you don't need Microsoft software to run Silverlight apps. Moonlight (the Mono equivalent) is open source.

Now maybe Miguel would disagree, but I think it's better to have a truly cross-platform bloated enviroment than to have a single-platform bloated environment (I assume Silverlight/Mono is at least close to Flash in bloat). Sure, I'd take streamlined before bloat, but cross-platform trumps streamlined.

Who you callin' "single-platform"?

By the way, aren't Android apps based on Java? Since when is that a paragon of efficiency? Or does Google use some kind of 'compiled to machine code' Java variant?

Heh, quite the opposite. Android's Dalvik VM is an interpreter, so it's far less efficient than Java on a PC. You're right, this sort of "bloat" is nothing new to mobiles.

I work on Mono, because I like it. If you want to learn more about my goals, you can read this old post:

http://www.mono-project.com/Mailpost:longreply

As for CodePlex: it turns out that there are two entities: CodePlex.ORG (owned by the Foundation) and CodePlex.Com (Owned by Microsoft, and has no affiliation with the foundation).

It is beyond unfortunate that the Foundation adopted the name from the hosting site. The logic apparently was "It is already a known brand". In my opinion, moving ahead with this name was a terrible decision as it is incredibly confusing, a point that I have raised with the board of directors.

The CodePlex foundation has no control over the contents of CodePlex.com.

MonoTouch is not a runtime or an "app", it's a library with which you compile your own apps. It's ahead-of-time compiled, so you end up with a binary that runs on the iPhone.

It opens up iPhone development for millions of .NET developers, many of which may not have any interest in Objective C. And as far as I can tell, C#/Mono is garbage collected, and Objective C (on the iPhone) is not. That alone would make me interested in checking it out.

If you're not interested, that's great, move along.

Probably not too bad - my guess would be it's using the AOT version of Mono, which compiles the framework into the final application, resulting in much better load times in performance-critical environments (see http://www.mono-project.com/AOT )

Because requiring Silverlight (and therefore Windows) severely dilutes the notion that Gate's action is altruistic. The content is only kinda free.

Wrong. Choose to use it or not as you wish but dont spread incorrect information.

Silverlight for Mac-> download

And of course you can choose the Mono implementation if you want FOSS versions instead Mono-> download

I'll give you 3 reasons to not use Silverlight, even the Mono implementation:

1. embrace
2. extend
3. extinguish

Because requiring Silverlight (and therefore Windows) severely dilutes the notion that Gate's action is altruistic. The content is only kinda free.

Wrong. Choose to use it or not as you wish but dont spread incorrect information.

Silverlight for Mac-> download

And of course you can choose the Mono implementation if you want FOSS versions instead
Mono-> download

Nope, he's right. .Net is tied to the Windows API to the point that Mono has a special layer emulating its behaviour:

The ECMA runtime and the .NET runtime assume an IO model and a threading model that is very similar to the Win32 API.

Dick Porter has developed WAPI: the Mono abstraction layer that allows our runtime to execute code that depend on this behaviour, this is called the `io-layer' in the Mono source code distribution.

GTK# works only on mono.

Not true.

A major fault that I've seen in numerous sub-threads is the idea that a Java user interface equals Swing. It most certainly does not. Swing is merely Java's complete pure-Java (i.e. cross-platform) user interface geared towards providing a unified look-and-feel. In this respect, it does a good job. While there's nothing inherently wrong with it from a toolkit perspective, it is absolutely not appropriate for usage on the Linux desktop.

Programming for the Linux desktop means more than producing a windowed application; one must integrate their application, both in terms of user interface consistency and application interoperabililty, with a major desktop distribution. Specifically, I'm talking about Linux's "big two" desktop environments, KDE + Qt and GNOME + GTK+. While each of these environments have their preferred languages (C++ and C respectively), many other languages have no issues whatsoever being tightly integrated into them via bindings.

Java is no exception! In Java, I can program a wonderful GNOME/GTK+ application just fine with java-gnome. Similarly, I can program a Qt4 application with Qt Jambi (although I can't seem to find an equivalent KDE4 bindings library) in Java. An application written in either will appear and operate on par with any application written in other languages, either natively (via C or C++) or via another bindings library (Python has a ton of bindings).

Furthermore, just like GTK+ and Qt have cross-platform capability, so do the bindings, and if the appropriate binding library for a given platform is installed on that platform, the Java application, too, will be able to be cross-platform without modification. This is, of course, the job of the distribution and/or installer software, but operates similar to the Deluge (Python) installer for Windows, installing the client port of the toolkit (GTK+, in this case) and the language bindings (PyGTK) alongside the application.

That's exactly how the Mono desktop applications work: they write their logic in native C# and use GTK+ bindings (GTK#, in most cases) to integrate with the Linux desktop environment.

Any Java application written for the Linux desktop that uses Swing over native desktop bindings is foolish. Each has their place, for sure, but on the desktop integration is everything.

If I'm migrating .net apps to Linux, I would target Java or other known Linux platform, rather than Mono with unknown status in terms of .net framework compatibility.

As others have pointed out, that's not migrating an existing app, that's rewriting it. As for 'unknown compatibility', not everything in .NET is implemented in Mono (WPF for example), but the libraries that are there work well. There is a migration analyser which will tell you if your app uses Windows-specific calls or APIs not yet supported by Mono. There is also the new project M/Invoke which can let .NET apps that call native Windows APIs run under Linux by replacing the P/Invoke call with a call to some managed code (which needs to be written, Wine-like).

I can't seem to find a references to it anymore but I know at one point the mono website specifically pointed out that the Winforms, ADO.net, and ASP.net implementations may have patent issues but they were prepared to work around them or just drop those pieces if needed. Actually, here it is: http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing

You're deliberately missing the point with a straw man argument.

Regardless of what external libraries are available, the Mono Project advertises support for WinForms, ADO.NET, etc, also claiming that it is a cross platform, open source .NET development framework, so you and I should as developers should be free to make use of them.

All the OP said was that right now if you want to play it safe with patents you pretty much have to avoid using most of the features that probably drew you to Mono/.NET in the first place.

Seriously, how did you get modded +5 informative? People like you are the ones spreading FUD forcing Mono developers and those who develop with Mono to argue against the same tired arguments over and over again.

Sorry, forgot to post the link to the FAQ:
        http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_General

        -dZ.

Q: Will you offer an ECMA-compliant set of class libraries?

A: Eventually we will. Our current focus is on inter-operating with the Microsoft SDK, but we will also offer an ECMA compliant subset of the libraries.

Not an issue.

If you want a GUI on Windows, or using the Windows libraries, sure.

GTK# is entirely developed by the Mono project, and requires none of the aforementioned Microsoft parts. That means applications like Tomboy and Banshee should now be fully RMS-friendly.

Mono is more than just 'running Windows applications on Linux'. There is a large ecosystem of utilities developed with it, because (a) a properly object-oriented language with native bindings is much better than the C-with-Gobject alternative, and (b) Java was not Free at the time.

No. If you actually took the trouble of reading what RMS wrote, he said specifically that *any* .NET platform implementation will have the same problem as Mono. He says free software developers should not develop apps that use the .NET platform, but that it is ok to have .NET platforms to run other existing .NET apps.

Wow, you morons are just as bad as Oprah viewers. I suppose you're not going to vaccinate your children, either?

It's a fantastic system to develop on and a huge time saver. Quite simply, companies that don't drink the moron koolaid will get more work done and enjoy better interoperability. The open source world lacks the vision to create cohesive platforms like this, so there's nothing wrong with implementing a well designed and solid one from the professional software world.

Besides, all free implementations of .NET are legally protected from prosecution for Microsoft's patents. If they go back on this, they could get countersued for opening them up in the first place.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030424174805/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00218.html

http://www.mono-project.com/Licensing

I think that the Debian folks, although they are doing a impressive job in maintaining the project, are very close to a situation where one could wonder if they don't keep double standards. But to make matters more grim I can't help wonder if they didn't bring this whole situation upon themselves.

When it comes to licenses and the slightest indication of software possibly being "non free" then Debian holds very high standards. And don't get me wrong: rightfully so. But where things started getting heavily off course (IMO naturally) is when they include broken software to make up for the loss of the original. There are many examples but the one I personally experienced was with Java. Instead of simply making the point "No, we don't include Java because its not open source" (an opinion which I still find highly questionable) they chose to include broken software and presented it in a way as Java (it "looked" and "felt" the same after all). Unfortunately, that horribly POS (personal opinion) wasn't even capable of getting people through the first chapters of the official Java tutorial. A situation which I think has put many people on the wrong track with regards to Java, even to a point where they concluded that Java on Linux was broke.

And now I'm wondering if that same approach hasn't moved many Debian (or deratives) users away from Java due to the extreme hassle around it only to adopt another (seemingly) better supported platform; C# in the form of Mono. Maybe this is a little too black/white portraited but I still think it might apply to some of them. So in that aspect I can't help wonder if Debian brought this entirely upon itself.

As for Stallman and his worries; I have to agree to some extend. History has shown us multiple times that you can't trust MS with things like these. I'm even shocked to see that Debian would exclude the official Java implementation because they deemed it "not open source" (only because the source was freely available, but not under a license which people liked) but will happily include an environment which cannot be deemed entirely free (yet?). But on the other hand, if you take a closer look at MS's trademarks you will see that there isn't any friction (yet) when comparing those to what can be seen on the Mono website.

Because please bear well in mind the header of that MS page: "The absence of a name or logo in this list does not constitute a waiver of any and all intellectual property rights that Microsoft Corporation or its subsidiaries have established in any of their product, feature, or service names or logos.". But one could always wonder; should MS do start throwing some weight around; what is stopping Mono from changing their: "We provide C# on other platforms" to "We provide a MS powered java-like platform on other platforms.".

All in all I think Debian is making a grave mistake, but I doubt it can result in a scenario as forewarned by Stallman.

Windows developers are at 3.5 SP! level, beta people are already checking version 4. What is Mono at? 2? Without very important windows forms right?

Wrong: "Support for Windows Forms 2.0 is complete. At this point, we are largely just fixing bugs and polishing our code."

I've written WinForms apps in Visual Studio that ran on Mono with no changes, and that was over a year ago. This month I've been doing command-line apps, and of course they work just fine on Mono as well.

Mono also supports many individual features of C# 3 and .NET 3.

See http://www.mono-project.com/License :

But Microsoft (and our co-sponsors, Intel and Hewlett-Packard) went
further and have agreed that our patents essential to implementing C#
and CLI will be available on a "royalty-free and otherwise RAND" basis
for this purpose.

This was in 2003, years before sun made java 'open'.

http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/faq_opensource.html

Q8. What does this mean for Mono and its inclusion in non-SUSE distributions? Does Mono infringe Microsoft patents?

"We maintain that Mono does not infringe any Microsoft patents. This agreement does not impact the rights and abilities of other distributions to bundle and ship Mono.

Novell is the leading contributor to Mono and we remain committed to the Mono project. Mono is a community project with many constituents and collaborators from companies, universities, governments and individuals.

The Mono project has a set of rules it uses to handle patents that might read on its implementation. The general policy is to work around, remove, or find prior technology on any patents that might read on any implementations in Mono. We continue to support this policy."

Also,
http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing#Patents

" Could patents be used to completely disable Mono?

First some background information.

The .NET Framework is divided in two parts: the ECMA/ISO covered technologies and the other technologies developed on top of it like ADO.NET, ASP.NET and Windows.Forms.

Mono implements the ECMA/ISO covered parts, as well as being a project that aims to implement the higher level blocks like ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms. ...The core of the .NET Framework, and what has been patented by Microsoft falls under the ECMA/ISO submission. Jim Miller at Microsoft has made a statement on the patents covering ISO/ECMA, (he is one of the inventors listed in the patent): here (http://web.archive.org/web/20030424174805/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00218.html)

Basically a grant is given to anyone who want to implement those components for free and for any purpose."

There is an OSS port of Silverlight (Moonlight), that Microsoft has done all that can be reasonably expected to support. If this project is inferior to the Windows version, that is a failing of the OSS development model and not of Silverlight or Microsoft.

Silverlight is essentially .NET bytecode + XAML markup + media .NET ECMA spec: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-335.htm

Silverlight XAML spec (under Open Specification Promise):
http://blogs.windowsclient.net/rob_relyea/archive/2008/10/14/ms-slxv-silverlight-xaml-vocabulary-2008-specification-v0-9-published.aspx

Media is MPEG-4 or MP3 (ISO), Windows Media (VC-1 is a SMPTE spec), and the Raw AV pipeline for extensitbilty to aribtrary codecs.

As for interoperabilty and portability, how about a GPL'ed clean room implementation?
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

Just in case anyone decides to post the parent as informative, I'll point out Moonlight which is an implementation of Silverlight that runs on Linux. There is also Mac support in Firefox and Safari.

Moonlight http://mono-project.com/Moonlight (with a semi official technical collaboration from microsoft.. they gave implementation hints). It has been around for a while and I'm sure it'll eventually get to 3.0 compatibility rather quickly

JavaFX may be trailing Flash and Silverlight, but it's the only RIA framework that has a snowball's chance in hell of being open sourced.

Then you should be pleased about about Moonlight:

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

Interoperable GPL'ed implementation of Silverlight, based on Mono.

They've got full Silverlight 1.0 compatibility, much of Silverlight 2, and even some features from Silveright 3 (which is still in beta).

http://www.mono-project.com/MoonlightRoadmap

JavaFX may be trailing Flash and Silverlight, but it's the only RIA framework that has a snowball's chance in hell of being open sourced.

Then you should be pleased about about Moonlight:

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

Interoperable GPL'ed implementation of Silverlight, based on Mono.

They've got full Silverlight 1.0 compatibility, much of Silverlight 2, and even some features from Silveright 3 (which is still in beta).

http://www.mono-project.com/MoonlightRoadmap

You are probably right about the cheap Lexmark's. Although a quick look at openprinting.org shows plenty of supported Lexmark's. I imagine all of the "paperweights" are the cheap or all-in-ones you mentioned.

However, all things considered, I would say Linux has fantastic printing support. Far more than just "business network lasers." The problem with the cheap Lexmark's is that they use a proprietary printer language (not PS or PCL). The Foomatic printer drivers provide a way to support these languages, but if someone has to reverse engineer it, it can take a while. The upside is if you reverse engineer it once, you can usually support a whole class of printers (ex: hpijs driver for many HP printers). If Lexmark were more cooperative, this might happen faster (the reason hpijs exists is because HP wrote it).

As for a "GDIwrapper", GDI+ is an entire graphics subsystem. It is not trivial to write a wrapper. That said, it looks like the Mono project has a library to convert GDI+ to Cairo. That puts you about halfway to a GDIwrapper for printing. You still need an EMF backend for Cairo, and you would want to be independent of Mono, which may or may not be a simple matter. Maybe somebody can take this on and solve the "Winprinter" problem.

Don't know about Silverlight, but the Mono people say you can use Mono to run ASP.NET: http://mono-project.com/FAQ:_ASP.NET

I call BS.

Moonlight for Linux. If you had even done a simple Google search for it, you would have found it.

As for the BestBuy thing, that's FUD. First of all, why does she even need to buy software? All manner of programs can be installed through your favourite distro's package manager (although the search in Ubuntu's could be made better - more often than not, you're better off doing a Google search to find the name of the pacakge that contains the program you want to install if you don't know already).

Secondly, even if she does have software that she absolutely must run, does it not work under Wine? Wine is pretty good these days - heck, even Office 2007 runs (albeit somewhat slowly & it has issues here & there, but enough to write up a report).

So at the end of the day, the thing that distro's could use would be a way of automatically detecting a Windows application & asking the user if they want to install Wine (explaining what it does).

Oh, and make it more obvious to first time users that programs should be installed through the package manager (and that they are all free, as in beer).