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Silverlight Released, Linux Version Coming
Today Microsoft announced the release of Silverlight 1.0 for Windows and Mac OS X. This cross-browser, cross-platform browser plug-in is fully supported and competes directly with Adobe Flash. Included in this release was the promise from Microsoft to support the 100% compatible Linux version, called Moonlight.
Microsoft will include Silverlight as an update and makes it high priority. Silverlight becomes success and passes Flash as the major app in the sector. MS will discontinue Moonlight because of BS reason. Linux is locked out by vendor lock-in.
This is purely hypothetical but not at all improbable.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
...stick to open formats and Free code ;-)
.net to kill off the huge popularity of Java, especially now that Java is moving to GPL they are trying extra hard to kill it off.
They are trying hard to encourage
will it be called sunlight :-)
Doesn't this sound like the history of the browser all over again:
Someone comes out with a technology that threatens Microsoft's dominance: Netscape.
Microsoft develops a multiplatform technology to defeat it: IE on Mac.
Microsoft incorporates it into its OS to get it into 90% of the PCs.
Once the competition is destroyed, it levels off development, and ends support on non-Windows platforms: IE on Mac.
It'll support *light on Linux/OSX until Flash is defeated.
I've been creating some Silverlight apps the last monts and my impresions are very positive. I have created some flash apps in the past, and there is no comparation. With Silverlight you have a very important subset of the .NET platform ready to use. Silverlight is not only the presentation forms (whichis also goos), but you can transparently use databases, manipulate and parse HTLM, wire handler events for HTML, excellent communication capabilities, and a lot more. IMO everything is more powerful/organized than the flash conteirpart.... Way to go!
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Open letter to Adobe - release Flash under the GNU GPL today
Dear Adobe,
No doubt you've seen the news that Microsoft and Novell are to work on a version of Silverlight for GNU/Linux. This puts Silverlight onto all three major platforms now, and puts yourselves and us into a difficult position. As the free software community, we want users of computers to have freedom to do all the jobs they can, including all those nice interactive websites out there that use Flash. We have Gnash now, but it's not finished yet, but it at least lets us look at YouTube movies in the browser with little or no problem, and Homestar Runner works very well as well. We're not there yet, but we're getting somewhere. Now, from your point of view, you give away the Flash player, but only in binary form, which means that while I'm sure it's better than Gnash, your license prevents us from using it with freedom. So, here's the rub... if you'll do a little thing for us, we can do some great things for you. We can help you beat Microsoft and crush Silverlight, but you're going to have to do something a little unusual, and a lot of people at Adobe aren't going to like it, but you have to do this and do it quickly.
Here goes... Make Flash free software, specifically, release Flash - the player, the editor, the server, for all platforms, including embedded stuff, under the GNU GPL v3 and do it quickly. As soon as you do this, we can start to win. We can get Flash Player onto the One Laptop Per Child machines, which gets a ton more eyeballs looking at Flash. We can get gNewSense, Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Slackware, Mandriva and all the others to distribute Flash Player with their distributions. OpenSolaris can have Flash Player, too. You can still sell copies of the Flash editor, in lovely cardboard boxes on the shelves of computer stores, even as Free Software - you just need to add value. Bundle DVDs of freely licensed shapes, characters, sounds, loops and effects and dead-tree editions of your now freely licensed manuals, and people will still buy it, and of course, you bundle it in with things like Creative Suite, so it gets onto more machines, and you make it a free of charge download, too. You encourage people to torrent it, and the source, and you'll see more features being added, you'll see more video formats being supported and you'll see people doing amazing things with software you created, but only if you act quickly and get this right.
Don't lose this to Microsoft, for the sake of freedom of computer users everywhere, for the sake of a free web and for the sake of generations of people to come, don't let Microsoft get away with this.
Sun are doing this with Java, they did it with OpenOffice.org. You can do this as well.
It's entirely down to you now. If you need help, ask. If you have questions, shout.
Call the Free Software Foundation today, and make this happen.
(+1-617-542-594)
Do the right thing.
Do it.
Best,
matt
Exploring Freedom blog.
you had me at #!
Good god. Shave off your fucking neckbeard. Try actually READING the fucking specs on silverlight and then saying that. It's actually a pretty nice transition from flash. But you're the average slashdot poster. Steve Balmer could save 25 children from burning to death in a building and you dumb fuckers would say he strapped them to a chair and threw them out the window to save them.
Actually, Moonlight as of today already integrates with Mono, already exposes all of the Silverlight 1.1 API and already runs most of the samples on the net (modulo a lot of bugs
Miguel.
Let me explain.
The specs as published on the web are pretty complete as far as a programming API goes. But there are some things that we do not quite understand how they work (either because the docs are not as complete as they should be, or because as implementors we need more details about the internals than those that are visible to the end user.
One thing that we have noticed over the years is that internal specifications are probably built by PMs at Microsoft. And these PMs use these internal specifications to explain certain behaviors on their blogs. I suspect this is because it is a fast path of communication as opposed to going through the documentation pipeline for released products. They are also probably able to clarify things for docs that have been already published. This is my guess.
So access to the specs is basically access to some documents and explanations that might not have made it to the public specification (for example recently Jackson and Chris had some questions about how the namespaces for CreateFromXaml behaved in the presence of merged trees, and it was not entirely clear how it worked; Luckily the Microsoft PM in charge of this was able to resolve the question in seconds).
Thanks for the nice words; I do feel that way.
In general, I think that there is much to be gained by having friendly relations with everyone in the industry instead of taking an antagonistic position. You attract more bees with honey than with vinegar kind of thing, and am glad that this is starting to show. I hope to see more collaborations between Microsoft and the Linux community in the future, not limited to Mono, but going beyond that.
Miguel.