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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"
Regardless though, having a native solution is always good.
Now that Moonlight is finished Miguel and his team should, having listened to customer demand (I believe that's the excuse Microsoft always uses), build some Free extensions on to Microsoft's work. Meaning the best experience can only be had by people running Moonlight under GNU/Linux and that some functionality will be unavailable to other platforms.
Gosh, does that mean people will be locked-in to using GNU/Linux? Well Microsoft could use the GPL'ed code if they want to! We'll call it 'Freedom lockin'. :)
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
While that's funny 'round these parts, Microsoft is really pushing hard for quality code on the inside. They're implementing processes on top of processes to create new processes to improve the quality of their software (or so they think.) And they're succeeding in a lot of ways -- the code they ship now as "1.0" is far better than any of their previous 1.0 offerings.
Internally they're killing off the cowboy coders that got them to where they are today. They've shifted the focus from brilliant coders to creative marketers and competent managers, and hire code monkeys to grind out exactly what the specs require. The cowboys who used to make giant leaps (like Miguel's leap here) are being neutered by best practices and architecture boards.
Yes, it's the way of the industry. What it really means is that the innovative spirits are likely to continue jumping ship for effective positions in small companies, and that Microsoft will remain a "competent" choice, but never a "great" choice. But that's what the rest of industry wants, anyway.
John
So Silverlight is a virtual machine that runs as a browser plugin?
Alrighty. If it is a virtual machine, where can we find documentation about:
1) the OPCODES of this vm
2) the standard libraries and interbrowser API
3) The format of silverlight compiled scripts
I have been un-able to find this information from the silverlight website.
Maybe this kind of information is what the MS/Novell deal meant when they said "exhange of technical information"?
And the Mono team was able to pull this of from this? Given these info, maybe someone else can implement Silverlight in 18 days in perl, 15 days in Ruby and 11 days in Python!
Flash doesn't run on Linux x86_64. As a software engineer, I can do everything on my Athlon linux box but play (most) video games and run Flash. I hate Adobe for their lack of Linux support and hope to see them either shape up or get destroyed by Microsoft. Let's not also forget that the vast majority of Flash websites are obnoxious eyesores and extremely tedious browsing experiences. I despise sites that rely on Flash for navigation or form handling. Some are nervous about MS controlling rich media websites. I ask. How can it get any worse than what Macromedia has done? The performance is poor, the linux support is poor, the experience is terrible. There's nothing positive about a site coded in Flash. As this article points out, I'll have a better chance at viewing Silverlight on my Ubuntu workstation than any Flash monstrosity.
And?
Lots of web content is made for Flash, which is in a dominant position on the web today. Flash is not an open web stndard, and its future development is always controlled by Adobe.
The difference? Thanks to Miguel and his team, there's a free and open-source implementation of Silverlight. There is not a free and open-source implementation of Flash; the only usable Flash implementations are and remain the locked-down, closed-source ones produced by Adobe themselves, and they use horribly restrictive EULAs to ensure that nobody who has ever looked at any Flash documentation is ever allowed to write a free competitor. Microsoft is actually being MORE free and MORE open than Adobe here. Haters take note.
Whether Silverlight succeeds or not, our dominant rich-web-content technology is going to be a closed technology controlled by a corporation with a chequered history. Given that fact, you know, I think I'll go with the one with a free implementation.
Having a competing implementation, used by many people, will mean that they cannot "embrace and extend" and cannot lock people into their products. After all, if they try to change the Silverlight standard, who is to say whether the MS implementation or the FOSS implementation will become the defacto standard?
Then we need to port Moonlight to Windows (and every other platform), so that the MS implementation isn't hte one that's mostly used. Otherwise, MS can just extend their own version in whatever way and have a large impact on those using Moonlight. If instead Moonlight and Silverlight have 50/50 market share, if Silverlight has a new feature, it won't be used by most until Moonlight catches up, or vice versa.
Twinstiq, game news
When you word it like that, it sounds like Microsoft are turning into IBM.
I tried installing Silverlight on my Mac, but the install exited with a message that I needed Mac OS X 10.4.8 or higher.
I have Mac OS X 10.4.10 - like most people who installed the latest patches.
I guess the six-character string "10.4.1" is less than the string "10.4.8"...
The Gnash (Gnu-Flash) team will take another 5 years to get their shit together, despite having declared a Flash 7 compliant Gnash player top priority. Whatever that means. Maybe they'll finish their website this year.
If only our OSS Microsoft Fanboy Midguel would galvanize his team to implement an entire pipeline of Flash tools, generators and Players. If MS doesn't kill this one off and a viable Kit of OSS tools & players for Silverlight comes to life I might even drop Flash RIA for it.
But no way, for as long as I live, will I support an non-open RIA standard that MS has total control over. I'd rather mess with Adobes crappy Flash IDE for another 10 years.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I work on the codec team at Microsoft, and have been working with Silverlight for a while. Silverlight actually comes out of the gate with extremely mature tools.
.flv encoders. WMV is also a better codec (encodes faster, looks better). And Windows Media Services in Windows 2003 Server is much more scalable and cost effective than the equivalent Flash server.
It's video experience is Windows Media, which has been shipping for years and is more widely available than good
For tools, there's the Expression suite for design, and Visual Studio for code. And unlike Flash, there's a really good workflow for designers, developers, and video folks to collaborate together without having a single person who runs the Flash app to integrate all the elements.
My video compression blog
This doesn't have to be the case, given that Mono is now a standard on Linux (and is still available on other platforms). This means that the Mono developers can add things not present in Microsoft's implementation, like GTK#, and developers can be assured that it will be available. For instance, the Beagle developers don't have to worry about compatibility with Microsoft's implementation of .NET because Mono is the standard on Free Software systems. Plus, developers can always bundle Mono with their application if they want to (as in DLL form, which makes it transparent to the user, rather than setup.exe form).
.NET) applications makes sense as long as enough people have Mono. As I said above, the advantage of Mono over German in this example is that Mono can be bundled, whereas the German Wikipedia doesn't yet come with Star Trek's universal translator.
To use the German translation of English works example, the German version of Wikipedia doesn't have to wait for an English article to already exist and translate it. They can write their own, whilst they may also translate some of the English articles. This makes sense as long as there are enough German-speaking users to bother doing it, just as making GTK# (or any other Mono extension of
Flash is currently a game of catch-up because the majority of Flash files won't run properly in Free Software players like Gnash (I keep a close eye on these projects, and no they are not usable yet. Unless you like waiting 5 minutes for anything more complicated than a stick man to render), so thus it is either Gnash (as an example) or Adobe, and Adobe's supports everything Gnash does and more. If (when?) Gnash is able to handle, display and run the majority of Flash files in a way indistinguishable from Adobe's player then it may start to become a standard on Free Software systems. If it becomes such a standard, and Free Software development tools exist (which is of course true for Mono, but not so for Flash in any significant way) then Gnash could easily add its own functionality without any trouble. People developing games (for example) for Linux systems could then use the Flash format with Gnash extras knowing that it is a fast, platform-independant format. So what if the widely used Adobe player is so pervasive in the Windows world and doesn't support the extras? The developer is making a game for Linux, where Gnash is a standard. If he wants to release it for Windows then he can just stick a Gnash executable and a script to launch it with the right file in the archive.
The same can happen for Moonlight. Whilst it may not become the most widely used implementation (which is still in question, since both implementations are new, but Microsoft's marketing will probably make this a foregone conclusion) it doesn't matter as long as it is widely used within certain target audiences, and catering to the others would be a matter of including it as a library.
Basically what Free Software can do for standards and implementations is make them transparent and cross platform. This is important, because choosing a development platform is then not dependant on install base, it is dependant on whatever you want to use. Package management (if done properly, with a standard cross-distro naming scheme) sort of makes this possible, since I can write an app in Python, C, Objective Caml or whatever else I want, and I can just set whatever is needed as a dependancy. If the storage overhead isn't a concern then I could just bundle it all together with my app. This then makes pushing efforts from Microsoft, Adobe, whoever a waste of money, since they're trying to market air. Everyone already has it, or can get it from anyone for no cost. Then there is no point using a proprietary system which you aren't allowed to bundle at the OS or application level, since it would just create confusion for the user who shouldn't have to know it exists (I know I know, it's long-winded, but I HATE the term "commoditised").
Well, I think my brain is empty now so I'll stop.
Use what you want to use. However, its not like Ballmer hasn't very publicly and clearly indicated MS's intent to sue Linux developers and users over the use of MS-patented technology. Actually, even if MS promsed not to sue, I'd disbelieve it, and the corrupt courts in the US wouldn't hold MS to such a promise. Wanna use mono & Sliverlight? Good luck! Hope you don't cut your throat with them. The mono infection in Ubuntu is why I've switched to Sidux. If neccessary, I'll switch to Debian. Screw MS, Ballmer, MS technology (including mono), and their worshippers.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.