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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.
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.
Y
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.
"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.
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.
Ready to ship? More debugging? Certainly this is the point where MS would ship it...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
Strictly speaking, Linux developers copied Microsoft's copy of a product acquired by Adobe from FutureSplash via Macromedia.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
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.
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
Strictly speaking, Linux developers copied Microsoft's copy of a product acquired by Adobe from FutureSplash via Macromedia.
That's not strict at all.
Microsoft used their copy of Java (.NET) to create a copy of FutureSplash which Adobe acquired via Macromedia, and Linux developers used their copy of Microsoft's copy of Java (.NET) to create a copy of the copy of FutureSplash.
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
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.
That's definitely not the case in this thread.
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
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).
Wow, you just listed like the 4 worst things about Linux.
The Farewell Tour II
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.
When you word it like that, it sounds like Microsoft are turning into IBM.
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.
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.
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
Nope. Miguel de Icaza mentioned explicitly in his blog that his team received guidance from Scott Guthrie and others in Microsoft.
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.
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