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Miguel Plans Silverlight on Mono & Linux by Years End
El Lobo writes "The Mono open-source project will create a Linux version of Silverlight by the end of year, said Miguel de Icaza, a Novell vice president and head of Mono. Asked about plans for Linux, Microsoft executives have been non-committal, saying that it will depend on demand. But de Icaza, who is attending Mix, was able to commit without hesitating."
The way I see it, only Novell has a license to be releasing a Mono/Silverlight plugin with Linux. Anyone else who jumps on the bandwagon might get a nasty call from Microsoft Legal demanding that they pay up the $650 extortion fee. Or has Miguel conveniently forgotten that the XAML/WPF framework is Microsoft's proprietary technology? (For which I'm sure they have many patents and trademarks.)
Tag: itsatrap
when you don't have any customers depending on it.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Sebastien Pouliot suggested we call it "Moonlight" (anagram on Mono).
And I was thinking Silver-light in another language, bonus points if the script is good looking.
For instance, in Arabic it would be fad-da daw' ( ) which looks cool on a large font(thanks to Hisham Bardam for the translation) although it does not roll easily. We might need some shortening.
Miguel.
Well, because I believe that Siverlight will become an important component in future applications. The majority of people will probably be happy to spice up their web applications with a little silverlight as it will run on Windows and MacOS.
But if there is no Silverlight for Linux, we will be prevented from getting access to content and applications that will be available.
So we got a couple of strategies dealing with this:
(a) the ostrich strategy also known as the "i-cant-hear-you" strategy: pretend that Silverlight does not exist and hope that by ignoring it, it will go away and vanish.
(b) Hope that nobody adopts it. I seriously doubt that Silverlight will not be adopted, in particular the CLR version shows a lot of promise.
(c) Be proactive and implement it ourselves: we got most of the hard bits of the technology already (a CLR, a JIT, the GC, the core class libraries, even up to some parts of LINQ).
Considering that we are very familiar with the technology, we can do something along the lines of (c). You can feel free to pursue avenues (a) and (b).
In fact, you can ignore Mono completely, nobody is forcing you to use it; Nobody is asking you to contribute to the effort, and nobody is in any position to force you to stop using whatever other technology happens to be your favorite one.
I loved the Silverlight announcement, it is a way of bringing my favorite platform to the web (the CLR and now the DLR) and it seems like a natural fit and extension to what Mono does.
And why exactly would I care about your pet project?
There is a cross platform alternative for flash in nearly every web browser - the BLINK tag can be almost as annoying as flash if used correctly.
The problem with your argument is that no one has even tried to make something better. You jump on the Microsoft bandwagon every single time. I miss the Miguel from the Gnome project. This new Miguel is just a Microsoft sellout. Silverlight hasnt even begun to take root, not by a long shot, and yet here you are already working hard to make sure it does.
Microsoft is not unbeatable. They have failed at everything they've tried over the last 5 years, whether it's Vista, IE7 or Zune. Making the stupid assumption that Silverlight is the next greatest thing is why people have lost respect for you.
"Seriously, rather than copy them, try being creative for a change and invent something better."
Oh, you mean this? GTK+ is a very good toolkit (the best one, as far as I'm concerned). And GTK is available on Mono. I used it, it's good - VERY good, very easy to use. As far as I'm concerned, this is much, much better than Windows.Forms.
Look around you. There are tons of high-quality non-MS open source projects that run on Mono. You seem to be thinking that copying the Microsoft runtime library is all that Mono does. That's far from the truth.
C# is a good language. I don't care whether MS made it or the Martians - it's good, there is an open source implementation, there are open source libraries, so I will use it.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I think you left out:
(d) come up with something better that can be made cross-platform from the get-go that gives people a compelling reason to use it instead of Silverlight, rather than permanently following along a few steps behind Microsoft.
Making poor imitations of crappy ideas isn't clear indication of talent; quite the opposite, in fact.
You forgot "want" before "believe", and we all know the result of introducing yet another nonstandard web extension is. I mean, it's worked so well for Microsoft in the past: proprietary JavaScript extensions, HTML extensions, ActiveX. It's just brought the web together into a nice, unified platform, so you never have to worry about how every different browser handles your website. Oh wait, no it hasn't: just the opposite.
How about: d) Proactively discourage its use; build, distribute, and support and alternative framework that is not under the control of a corporation known for breaking compatibility regularly to discourage competition. Get this into Firefox and build an IE plugin to support it.
I think you just asked the question that so many others are asking about Mono.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Agreed. The vitriolic tone of this thread is somewhat astonishing to me. I'm primarily a Windows/.NET developer that is slowly working towards migrating to a Linux platform, and the Mono project is one of the key technologies leading me in that direction. When Microsoft announced that Silverlight was going to be a cross-platform technology that only ran on Windows and Apple, I was extremely frustrated. I can understand why, strategically, Microsoft has chosen not to implement a Silverlight implementation on Linux, but I cannot understand why the majority of those commenting on this thread are arguing so vehemently against Miguel.
.NET is a pleasure, and a can gaurantee you that coding for the Silverlight platform is going to be infinitely more organized and structured than coding for Flash. Website developers are going to flock to this new technology. Without a Linux implementation of Silverlight, 20% of websites will be completely inaccessible to Linux users in 5 years.
Silverlight is not just a reimplementation of Flash. Coding in
Slamming Mono for implementing Silverlight is about as irrational as slamming Opera or Mozilla for implementing JavaScript.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Web Projects Using Mono
W ho_uses_Mono.3F
* Fiducial (http://fiducial.biz): Their new site uses Mono and ASP.NET.
* Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org): WikiPedia uses Mono for its search facilities. The indexing and the actual searching is done by Mono-based applications.
* GovTrack.Us (http://www.govtrack.us/)
* GotMono.Net (http://www.gotmono.net)
* Yakugo.com (http://www.yakugo.com) is an AJAX-based English-Japanese dictionary site that uses Mono.
* [1] (http://www.saileventschedule.de) A web-based schedule for sailing events like racing and training.
More can be found at:
http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono#
The problem is that some of us want to have access to content that will be produced with Silverlight
And some of us don't want there to be lots of content produced with Silverlight. It's bad enough that so much of the content on the web is tied up in little obfuscated applets in Java and Flash as it is. Seriously, there's pretty much only three things these are used for: advertising, low-quality DRM, and toys and games. Exceptions like the Java applets at Greg Egan's site are far and few between, and Google has shown us with Maps and Gmail that you don't *need* these plugins to produce rich content.
Thank goodness Microsoft's first try failed, and we don't have ActiveX and its security problems on Mac and Linux.
We don't need a better Silverlight or a better Flash. We need better tools inside the framework that we already have.
When was the last time that you used the "UNIX programming environment" in your web browser? Last I checked, you had to write in a subset that isoaltes you from the operating system and only allowed DOM access and Javascript.
Flash, the other major tool for RIAs, does not give you access to *any* Unix facilities.
You seem to be confused as to what Silverlight is.
One of the nice things about Silverlight (as I pointed out in a blog entry a few weeks ago) is that you can actually generate Silverlight content with any Unix tool you want.
You can easily generate it with PHP:
header ("Content-Type: application/xaml");
print "
";
Or you can generate it with shell, perl, python or assembly language.
The server side is probably as Unixy as anything else can get.
All Mac users were UNABLE to watch any videos on MSNBC AT ALL for YEARS.. because Microsoft required you to "Upgrade to Internet Explorer ON WINDOWS ONLY". Even though other sites were able to show Windows Media files on Macs.. MSNBC DISABLED the ability for macs to try to get us to switch.
Lately you can watch snippets of videos on MSNBC because they are "beta testing" FLASH to show their videos ONLY because of the success of YouTube. You still cannot watch live events on macs though.
The point of all this is that Microsoft is not making Silverlight because they care about the community. They are making it so that they can stranglehold all of the non windows users at some point down the road Once we all get sucked in and a bunch of sites are made using Slverlight.. Microsoft will then come out with a new feature that will ONLY work on Windows.. and then we will all be sorry again.
I am a web developer who has to make 4 different versions of each site because of all the "bugs" in IE.
I would be an idiot to build a site using Silverlight.. because we all know exactly what's going to happen with that format down the road.
Another piece of software to avoid. Miguel though I don't know you, you seem to be the kind of powerhouse who I wish wasn't working at Novell. Actually sitting in the seat that is responsible for Novell's side of the MS embrace and extend campaign. I even took the time to look a little at Silverlight - no I didn't install it. If it is as nice as you say maybe it would be nice, if all things were equal.
.Net, by copying MS' extension of .Net. There is nothing inevitable about silverlight. In fact, someone of Miguel's talent (at least in project management, I don't know him personally) could do a great deal for open source if he wasn't always copying Microsoft.
But they aren't. And I don't know if I trust someone who is both indeminified against lawsuits from Microsoft and (as he blogs) gets drunk with senior Microsoft employees. The timing is bad, to say the least, who wants to use crippleware and anything smelling of MS/Novell?
Other people have said but I will add: There is nothing earthshaking about Miguel's desire to extend Mono, his copy of
I believe his arguments are disingenuous. (Well, fake.) MS is NOT able to easily push new technologies into acceptance. They can spend a lot of money on advertising. The video of siverlight movie editing was cute but huh? It was using a faked Minority Report video, and an attempt to make a Minority Report interface (not as good as Kai's Power Tools about 10 years before this), and a laugh at anyone who really does video editing. This new Novell project is premature, serves to support MS embrace and extend, paints a nice target for threats and guess what if you build a successful company on it MS will own your ass.
Whatever silverlight promises may be nice to have, and some snippets I saw in his blog about Ruby and 3D sounded enticing. But you know what? You don't need anything Microsoft to do cool things. Maybe this will be impetus for open source people who don't work at Novell and carouse with the MS senior execs to get moving on developing something more interesting. I'd rather not intentionally put manacles on my own arms and wait for the other shoe to drop, which is what it seems is required for using Miguel's software. Head in the sand indeed, let's wait until the world depends on silverlight I've got plenty of other things to do. Someone tell me why you want to help son of SCO? Getting drunk with the execs indeed! Fuck off!