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."
Am I the only one who gets the feeling they keep on arriving too late every single time?
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.
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);
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.
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