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Mono Coders Hack Linux Silverlight in 21 Days
Etrigoth writes "After the recent announcement of Silverlight by Microsoft at their Mix event in Vegas, Miguel de Icaza
galvanised his team of developers in the Mono group at Novell to create a Linux implementation, a so-called 'Moonlight'.
Remarkably, they achieved this in 21 Days.
Although they were first introduced to Silverlight at the Las Vegas Mix, de Icaza was invited by a representative of Microsoft France for a
10 minute demonstration at the Paris Re-Mix 07 keynote conference, should they have anything to show.
Joshua, a blogger for Microsoft has confirmed that the Mono team did not know anything about Silverlight 1.1 before its launch. Other members of this team have blogged about this incredible achievement, Moonlight hack-a-thon. It's worth noting from a developer perspective that Moonlight is not Mono and doesn't require Mono to work"
Joshua, a blogger for Microsoft has confirmed that the Mono team did not know anything about Silverlight 1.1 before its launch. Other members of this team have blogged about this incredible achievement, Moonlight hack-a-thon. It's worth noting from a developer perspective that Moonlight is not Mono and doesn't require Mono to work"
It's often said that ideas are a dime a dozen, but implementations are few and far between.
If it had been done on a normal time scale, the novelty here would be the fact that the implementation exists. But considering it was done in three weeks, instead of six months, shows the sheer speed and effectiveness that Miguel's teams demonstrate.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
"Microsoft® Silverlight(TM) is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows."
:-)
Remember, Google is our friend!
No matter where you go... there you are.
Silverlight 1.1 is a stripped down version of the .Net framework 3.0. They took the 25+meg 3.0 library and started trimming out namespaces until they got down to a 4 meg library that could be run as a browser plug-in. So while their work is commendable, the hard part (the .Net libraries) was already done as part of the existing Mono project. I imagine the most time consuming part was determining exactly which namespaces Microsoft left in.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Right, so MS had promised from the start that Silverlight would have a Linux version.
I just didn't realize they had been planning on achieving that goal by getting a bunch of OSS coders to do all their work for them for free.
Oh well, probably better this way, since it might remain capital-F Free. What's the Moonlight license, anyway?
If this _is_ a "FREE" implementation of Silverlight it really will start to look like a nicer alternative to the poorly-supported, closed-source Flash for Linux.
it sure is
Moonlight does not use Mono or .Net or C# or anything like that. It's written in C++ and can be used as a Firefox plugin directly. Read all the links at the top of the Slashdot story.
Go to http://silverlight.net/ and click the "Silverlight in action" link on the right hand side. Then tell me that Flash still has them beat ;)
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
What the heck is Silverlight?
:-)
Okay, Silverlight is a Microsoft product, and is some kind of plug-in related to "media experiences and rich interactive applications for the web", according to the above page. Not finding that especially enlightening, I clicked on the FAQ, where the first question is "What is Silverlight?". Great! Unfortunately it yielded a "We're sorry, the page you requested could not be found" error. Maybe I need Javascript turned on or something? Ah. There we go. [Shrug] Huh? Same terse verbiage-filled useless description as before. Thanks for nothing. Other information on the FAQ page imply streaming of content using "Windows Streaming is another major goal of the product, complete with fancy DRM [weak Golf clapping].
So, I'm still not 100% sure, but I think it's trying to emulate the typical user experience with Flash, including the ungraceful handling of missing/disabled browser features
Oh. I did find out that the Microsoft definition of "cross-platform" is Windows (versions unspecified) and Mac OS X 10.4.8+ (Intel and PPC), but they say they are considering wider support.
Favorite buzzword phrase: "free cloud-based hosting and streaming solution".
Cloud-based? I haven't heard that one before.
That, and the whole Dmitry Sklyarov affair.
No, Adobe, we haven't forgotten.
"Piter, too, is dead."
It did not run on firefox on my ubuntu linux box....so no it cannot hold a candle to flash, which
just so happens to work on my machine.
Got Code?
I disagree; YouTube used Flash because Flash was popular.
I refer you to the Flash penetration statistics Adobe keeps:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flash
Meh, IIRC Mono hasn't even completed the port of .Net 2.0 (especially the ASP.NET part), let alone .Net 3.0. So they had to implement whatever .Net 3.0 libraries Silverlight may have needed.
This is a shame, because that person has been flaming everywhere.
The slashdot admins have said that they can not do anything about it.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Flash was huge before 2005. v5 may have been when things started to take off, I don't really know...but Flash definitely had the majority of the market well before Youtube and Adobe came around.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=6005
References a page on Macromedia.com which now only shows 2006 stats but I don't see why they'd post a blatant lie. In 2004 Flash had well over 90% penetration in US and Europe.
For one thing, Silverlight supports the VC-1 codec. This would allow embedded HD video which Flash currently can't handle.
Ever since Adobe started using the On2 codec, HD Flash is not a problem. We just shipped several HD clips in Flash for a job and they looked great.
Most of the stuff on
Not in Flash 9/CS3/Actionscript 3. It's far faster than previous versions due to the removal of features like variable watching and a new event system, better class system and an entirely redesigned VM. Infact, in my experience, it's of equal speed or faster than managed code as well as easier to hack for.
You don't seem to understand what "antitrust" means -- and unfortunately, you're not alone in this here on Slashdot. It seems lots of people think "antitrust" means any sort of subjectively "unfair" market manipulation, but that's not what it means. Antitrust law, broadly speaking, has to do with monopolies that are unfairly leveraged, with oligopolies that collude to set prices, and with mergers and acquisitions that consolidate the only major players in a market into one, dominant player.
First off, despite what you may have heard, in the US at least, monopolies are not illegal. If by fair competition you become the only player on the block, you are not subject to antitrust law. If, however, you use your monopoly position to create barriers to entry into the market (other than the natural barriers caused by competition) or if you use your monopoly in one market to unfairly compete in another market, you may be subject to antitrust law.
With regards to Apple -- and for the record, I am not a fanboy, I don't own an iPod and I run Debian on my Thinkpad -- there is very little evidence that they have a monopoly anywhere at all. First: the iPod is not a monopoly. This seems to be very difficult for some Slashdotters to grasp. Yes, it is by far and away the most popular digital music player on the market today, but it is not the only one. And it isn't like the only alternative is Microsoft's Zune or some other non-profitable offering subsidized by a powerful company trying to break into the market, either. There are literally thousands of competitive offerings, with the same feature set as the iPod, many of them technically superior in pretty much every way to the iPod, that are cheaper to boot. People in the US don't seem to buy them much, but they most certainly are available. The barriers to entry in the digital music player market are extremely low, and there is nothing whatsoever about Apple's dominance that changes that. Companies like Creative, iRiver, and countless other small no-name brands from China manage to remain profitable, although their volumes are somewhat lower than Apple's. But hey, newsflash: most markets have a dominant player. That doesn't mean the dominant player has a monopoly, and even if it they did, it doesn't mean they obtained that monopoly unfairly or that they're abusing their monopoly to fix prices.
The only semi-possible charge related to antitrust law that has ever been levied against Apple is with regards to their Fairplay DRM, which is only available on the iPod, and which allegedly causes vendor lock-in. Well, there's a big reason that no one ever pursues this: it's a non-starter. Many competing music players play AAC without DRM these days, and according to Apple's own data, the overwhelming majority of music on people's iPods does not come from the iTunes music store, which is pretty much the only place that you might get AAC + Fairplay tracks. Unless you put DRM on your own tracks -- and who does that -- most music is still ripped from people's own CD collection or obtained illegally via P2P or similar.
These complaints about Fairplay also ignore the glaringly obvious: pretty much any proprietary software package also has proprietary file formats, many of which are deliberately obfuscated, precisely in order to lock users into their products. Reading Microsoft hackers' own experiences reverse engineering the WordPerfect document formats back when that product was dominant is extremely illustrative in this regard. (The fact that I'm pointing out that this is standard industry practice should not in any way be construed as support for said practice; I am in favor of open document formats precisely because I disagree with vendor lock-in. But the fact remains: this sort of thing, by itself, is not an antitrust violation.)
In fact, my iRiver (which I purchased because it supports Ogg Vorbis and love) supports some DRM-laden format of its own, IRM or somesuch, which
Well, certainly at the core of what Silverlight can do, we are following Microsoft direction, but we have already taken Silverlight in new directions, for example we are able to use it to extend Gtk# applications and to create desklets. Both things that were not initially supported by Silverlight.
It should be very easy to support OSX, but Microsoft already supports OSX, so there is not much of a motivation for us to put the cycles on it.
Silverlight supports both progressive download and streaming.
I've been demoing 720p HD streaming to Silverlight at 4 Mbps. It works fine today (and Silverlight 1.0 is still only in public beta).
My video compression blog
Hint: WMV3/VC-1 isn't reverse-engineered anymore. Apparently the MS-hating got in the way of your vision and you missed where MS released a full reference implementation including source code and documentation. Further, since it's an ISO standard, there's no "hidden code" anywhere, ok? In fact, On2 Truemotion VP6 (flash) is the reverse-engineered code here. Try reading, it's good for you.
I tried to watch the video, but then saw that it's in .wmv format, which is pretty much "illegal" for me to view when running Linux.