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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"
This will give MS more of a foothold in the market. They wanted this to happen! Now flash isn't the only cross platform game in town so now the marketing guys will be able to say YES IT WILL WORK ON LINUX so you dont just need to use flash!
... to congratulate Miguel and his team for this remarkable achievement!
Gives an insight into what Open Source is capable of.
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Personally, I'm the last guy to want MS dominate anything, but I hope they fucking smear adobe.
As far as web software, adobe is the epitome of crap. MS takes 2nd place.
"Linux developers implement in two weeks the compatibility and usability features that Microsoft intentionally left out."
Miguel de Icaza doesn't hate Microsoft.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
That said.. it occurred to me that, just like any other "standard" supported by a company, one has to be careful in employing it and depending on it. MS could easily make incompatible changes at any time in the future to the Windows implementation, creating a non-stop game of tag for the Moonlight developers. Remember what MS did to HTML? It will be even easier to "embrace and extend" for MS on their _own_ standard. It would be much better if there were an open standard for this sort of media. SVG comes close, but I have yet to see a fast, dependable, and standardized implementation, and Flash, unlike SVG, supports much more than just vector graphics.
Ok, they might develop thousand times faster than Microsoft. Unfortunately it is and always will be Microsoft leading the way, Mono & Co lagging behind. Nothing will change that.
That depends, if it were demonstrated to have been yanked to stifle the competition, then yes it could be an antitrust problem. If they yanked it because it was a huge security nightmare, and they were going to release a new more secure browser, then probably not.
But that being said, Apple hasn't been bitchslapped or even investigated for the charges I read about from time to time, about early on how Jobs manufactured an iPod shortage to enrich Apple's margins. That kind of amazes me, because I'll read about that from time to time in articles that praise Jobs performance since he got back. I suspect that if that and the mandatory minimum pricing on the iPods isn't considered to be fodder for antitrust suits, I doubt that MS should be smacked for removing an insecure browser from the market. Even if it does harm the competition or consumer.
It's a good hacking achievement, but let's just consider the usefulness of this.
Creating Moonlight assumes that there is going to be lots of web content made for Silverlight, and this assumes that Silverlight will be put in a fairly dominant position on the web in the not too distant future as a result. Silverlight is not a open web standard, nor is XAML, and its future development is always controlled by Microsoft.
I just don't think people think through what the ultimate aims, goals and endgames are for things like this regarding open source software.
Great achievement, and I say good job!
.NET before, or port of Avalon or anything at all.
But just preemptively want to explain why is the development timeframe difference between MS and Linux (because I see stupid uninformed posts coming, it's Slashdot after all).
What these guys did, is take Mono (for Linux), and make a standalone subset of it, Silverlight (for Linux). So there aren't huge surprises here.
On the Microsoft side of the story, it's different: they had to first sit down and figure out what the subset will be. Then they had to count the bytes (literally) of every feature they include, since for proper mainstream deployment, the plugin should be as small as possible (I won't be surprised if Moonlight is not something like twice the size of Silverlight or more).
Then they had to make it work on Mac, where they didn't have a port of
I just watched the video. I saw nothing that Flash couldn't do, much less anything that Shockwave couldn't do.
The reason why Flash is popular isn't because you can create complicated applications with it. (You can, but nobody uses them.) The reason why it's popular is because it's small, fast, and has a very large, cross-platform installed base. Silverlight isn't any of those three.
~ roscivs
Court: "Microsoft, you've been found guilty of anti-competitive and monopolistic practices. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Microsoft looks at the floor, hands in pockets, mumbles "Sorry...."
Court: "Well, don't let it happen again!"
Just junk food for thought...
The real reason that Flash is popular is because that is the standard that YouTube decided on.
And why did YouTube decide on Flash as their standard? Because Flash plugins were mature and reliable, worked well with all leading browsers and OS platforms, and even came pre-installed with many browser distros. Because it allowed them to avoid the game of "Select your poison: Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime?" that users at previous video sites had to play. Because tools for generating and publishing Flash content were not onerously expensive.
Is Silverlight any of these things yet?
>All they have to do is yank iexplore32 and flash dies overnight.
All they have to do is yank iexplore32 and Firefox wins overnight.
There, fixed that for you.
what could have come about from the Mozilla-GNOME collaboration several years back if people had been as dedicated to Mozilla/XUL/XBL as they are to Microsoft/Silverlight/.Net. I think it's kind of sad, personally.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Ok, before Mono I, as a Linux user, was unable to run applications written in C#. After Mono I, as a Linux user, now have the choice as to whether or not I want to run a C# application. You want me to be mad about that?
Miguel has not taken anything away from Linux, everything he's done has added to the choices we have. I would rather have an open-source implementation of Silverlight for Linux than have no implementation or a closed-source implementation. If you don't like Silverlight, don't install Moonlight, but don't presume to tell me if I should or should not use it.
If anything, Miguel has just proven that even if Microsoft keeps changing the API, the Mono team can keep up.
http://www.mhall119.com
The opcodes of the machine are documented on the standard ECMA 335.
The standard libaries and browser APIs are available from http://msdn2.microsoft.com/ a lot of the documentation is still under development for Silverlight 1.1 (1.0 is much more complete) so for a few things that are new in 1.1, you have to guess what they are, or look it up in the WPF docs (which is where stuff ultimately came from).
The format of the Silverlight compiled scripts is documented in ECMA 335 as well.
hate Adobe for their lack of Linux support and hope to see them either shape up or get destroyed by Microsoft.
Did you really just compare Adobe to Microsoft in terms of poor Linux support? If Silverlight becomes workable on Linux, it'll be because a group of hackers reverse-engineered and re-implemented it, not because MS gives a shit about Linux. If you're going to judge these techs by their third-party open-source implementations, then you should be talking about the several free flash players that are currently much more functional than Moonlight.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Nope. Miguel de Icaza mentioned explicitly in his blog that his team received guidance from Scott Guthrie and others in Microsoft.
As usual, Slashdot editors just assume that everyone knows what Silverlight is, as though we all follow Microsoft's every move.
.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."
.NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications..."
... experiences"? Is Silverlight psychoactive, like marijuana?
The developers of Moonlight make the same assumption. I see no explanation on the Moonlight developer web site.
From Microsoft: "Microsoft® Silverlight(TM) is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of
Most of that seems to be written by a marketing man who doesn't understand the product, but wants write about it anyway. What are "... the next generation of
What is "delivering
What kind of "experiences"? Does someone ring your doorbell, and when you answer it, pour water on your shoes?
How is Silverlight "fast"? Isn't the speed limited by the user's internet connection?
What does "on the Mac OS or Windows" mean? Does Microsoft intend to exclude Linux?
For the amd64 Linux/Konqueror user, youtube is one of those sites that NEVER works. Now, pages that just provide a link to an avi/mpg file work just fine.
Flash videos are just incredibly annoying. Inevitably I just figure out the url for the flv file and download it so that it can be played with mplayer.
Video shouldn't require a plug-in to work. And if it does they could at least make it more widely available...
...unless you happen to not run Windows, of course. While Windows Media has been shipping for years, I don't really think you have an official distribution of the latest codec for Linux and MacOS - unlike Adobe, who offer Flash 9 for all major platforms. After all, if you want to compete with Flash you have to offer all dependencies from one source; telling users to use Google's reverse engineered code (ie. FFMpeg's WMV3 functionality) doesn't quite cut it unless you can guarantee that FFmpeg is 100.00% compatible. Given that you even have Silverlight for all three major platforms, that is.
This is not supposed to be an "fulfill my unreasonable demands or else!1" flame, but really, Adobe has set a certain standard for interoperability and if Silverlight doesn't live up to that standard it's yet another Windows-only technology that no sane web developer will use because Flash does the same on more platforms. After all, ActiveX has done what Silverlight does now for quite a while, if the user was ready to accept the security issues.
(By the way, a codec developer who uses the term "video experience" to describe a container format/video codec? Microsoft's PR department must make some really good Kool-Aid!)
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