Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft To Open Source Some of Silverlight
Kurtz writes with word that Microsoft is about to follow in Adobe's footsteps by releasing the source code to part of its Silverlight technology. The news comes less than a week after Adobe announced plans to open source the Flex SDK. Microsoft is hungry to build the developer base for its rich Internet app tools, if it can.
So RTFA - but none of it's official, there are no details other then a little about the market space. In fact I suspect the discussion on Slashdot will be more interesting.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
No, they will just open source the simple bits that Mono already has mostly sorted out, leaving a fairly small but extremely critical patent-encumbered bit (video codec, maybe) that prevents anyone else making a useful implementation.
The PR people will then jump around saying Microsoft==open!!!eleven!. Do you see?
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Some of us hate flash - small tip if you don't have a T1 connection and things are slow Block flash and the internet really speeds up.
If people wish to develop sites that we cant view (think scfi channel) or adverts in it then its not a problem here as we associate flash with rubbish/spam.
Also a defacto standard is not if no 'upto' date linux plugin is available. It is possible to live without flash, and yes the world is a better place.
Flash (and wannabe ompetitors)is a childrens program whether the flash developers suck more the program is something that becomes conjecture.
Am I the only one who gets the feeling they keep on arriving too late every single time?
I mean, call me picky, but shouldn't they finish developing IE to an acceptable standard before they start on a Flash competitor?
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
It was probably the printer friendly version that was linked, so it'd make sense to automatically show the print dialog. The alternative would be to have the article on 8 pages each with its own talking smiley pop-up that scares the shit out of you due to its creepy "I wuv you" catchphrase and the fact you forgot that your speakers were on pretty loud.
Why does my post history abruptly stop? I want to laugh at the stupid things I posted as a kid.
Actually, Adobe released Flash Player 9 for Linux last October... I'm not sure what more you want. They now have Flash Player for Solaris, too. Obviously it exists for Windows and OSX, as well. Yes, Flash can be abused... but Flash can also be really useful for creating engaging user experiences and it's also an EXCELLENT platform for application development, particularly via Flex. Flex 2 is great, Actionscript 3 is a really nice language featuring the best of OO and dynamic languages, the AVM2 virtual machine is a really nice piece of work. I know more and more enterprise developers who do .NET or Java that have been exposed to Flex 2 in recent months and come to like it very quickly. The power that it affords is great, it "just works" (regardless of browser/OS), and it's infinitely better to develop apps of all kinds in than HTML/CSS/Javascript.
So I'm sorry that you have such issues with Flash. But as a development platform, it's appealing in many ways. And ever since the Adobe/Macromedia merger, Adobe has really become more open with their developers and has been releasing more and more tools to help them out (checkout labs.adobe.com for some examples).
#include "bsod.h"
/* anyone remember the days when slashdot allow you to quote pre-formatted text? */
main() { if(running_on_linux()) { crash(horribly, messily); } return proprietary_blob(patented); }
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Lots of people on here worried about interoperability, cross platform runtimes and the likes, but those comments on msdn show that those using MSFT technology couldn't care less. *sigh*
The problem is that Flash doesn't integrate in with anything ASP or .NET . XML is good in some ways for this, but no .NET developer wants to learn ActiveScript, buy FlashMX, learn a whole new way of creating UIs, and learn about AJAX to get Flash integrating with their current systems.
I think if Adobe invested more in Flash, and specifically getting more developers into Flash, they'd have a solid niche. But they've made Flash development more difficult to get into than it needs to be, and I think that based on that alone you can predict that Silverlight will probably fight a downhill battle and win over Flash.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
And if you visit Korean websites, everything is either Flash or ...get this... pictures of text. That's right -- most of the "text" I find on Korean websites can't be searched or indexed because they made a graphic out of it! Flash and pictures of text. Wow. I would hate to be a blind Korean trying to use the Internet.
Put identity in the browser.
"Linux/OSX support it"
Does it? Aside from the fact that it cannot be offered with the OS because of license restrictions, I have heard of many people having problems running Flash on Linux. What we really need is something like this that uses entirely open standards so third party players can be developed (not sure if MS will agree to do that for Silverlight, though).
From what I have heard, the main advantage to Silverlight is that it integrates better with .NET applications on the server-side. Besides, how can a little bit of competition be a bad thing? Worst case it will force Adobe to improve their product in order to keep from losing out to Silverlight. If you were to argue we don't need new technologies when there is already something that is "good enough", we should all be running applets in Netscape.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Microsoft has been using open source for some time, albeit sometimes with restrictive licenses, but rarely has any of it been useful for anything but developers already committed to Microsoft's platform.
... people are interested in what open source does for them. Open source frees them from dependence on a single vendor, it frees them from license fees and royalties, it allows them to share responsibility with a large pool of like-minded developers, and so on. Open source products tied to a single vendor, whether it's hardware (like a Linux-based set-top box or PDA) or software (one of Microsof's efforts was an open-source installer for Windows applications) is only going to be interesting if it's useful for the things they're already doing.
There are several reasons people may be interested in open source, but they all have one thing in common
Open-sourcing *part* of a product, when you're potentially going to have to pay Microsoft to use the rest (the price I read was the first million users free, then 25 cents per user after that), is a pretty obvious poison pill.
While not directly related to the open-source angle of this story, here is Scott Guthrie (Silverlight team manager) talking about some of the more in-depth aspects of it. (36m long) http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=3045 08
They've certainly pulled that trick before. Where are:
* MS Core fonts for the web
* IE for Mac / UNIX
* Windows Media Player for Mac
Microsoft's idea of cross platform is do it till its popular and then EOL everything but Windows. The only reason they're doing this at all is that Flash video is killing WMV.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
Before you jump on the MS bashing bandwagon please take a look at the linked video. Even better, download the client plugin and view the demos. It's cross platform and supports a ton of languages including C#, Ruby, Javascript, etc.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power