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Mono Coders Hack Linux Silverlight in 21 Days

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the break-out-the-red-bull-and-go-go-go dept.

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"

4 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And the novelty is... ? by Kimos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oooh, Linux developers copied a Microsoft product in two weeks! How novel, how path-breaking!
    What this is actually saying is:
    "Linux developers implement in two weeks the compatibility and usability features that Microsoft intentionally left out."
  2. Re:Why?! by kerohazel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    swf is an open format so THAT obviously isn't the problem...

    From http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/
    "This license does not permit the usage of the specification to create software which supports SWF file playback."

    It's a bit like having a research library that permits you access to any book you want, as long as your paper doesn't cite one as a reference.

    --
    Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
  3. Re:Wonderful by roscivs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 ;)

    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
  4. Re:Wonderful by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?