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Portugal's Vortalgate — No Microsoft, No Bidding
An anonymous reader writes "Companies using software other than Microsoft's are unable to bid at many Portuguese public tenders. This is due to the use of Silverlight 2.0 technology by the company, Vortal, contracted to build the e-procurement portal. This situation has triggered a complaint to the European Commission by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association; the case is unofficially known in Portugal as 'Vortalgate.'"
I know nothing of web programing but was under the impression that Flash sucks for any actual applications beyond a video or basic games.
And that silverlight was more or less flash but is easy to program for.
I was under a similar impression, except that Silverlight, while being easier to program for, actually blows Flash out of the water in functionality.
I know that my experiences with Silverlight have been overwhelmingly positive compared to Flash.
It's also worth mentioning that Silverlight works well in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on Windows, as well as Firefox and Safari on OS X.
Moonlight even works on Firefox on Linux, and it's getting better at a pretty good rate.
Complaining that it requires a separate plug-in while promoting Flash, Java, and others is stupid, since Flash and Java both require separate plug-ins as well. And what do Javascript, Perl, etc, have to do with anything? They're not exactly competing products.
Face it, Silverlight is good. It's multi-platform and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere.
Check out Adobe Flex, its Flash for actual business applications. It is an astoundingly good programming language and is actively being supported by people like Google and SalesForce.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Point is: MS is dominant. MS is proprietary. In other words that means that Microsoft uses it's dominant position to release some stuff that nobody is allowed to know how it works, and so competition is doomed. That means anti-trust. That means that the EU needs to start kicking some serious ass along the lines of "Microsoft, open up the specs, release without a license, stick to your specs, otherwise you are no longer allowed to release new software on the EU. No fines. No multi-billion dollar payments. Just do it or lose the right to sell anything untill you comply.
It. Must. Be. Like. That. And. No. Other. Way.
Here be signatures
Right! I'm wondering how long it would take for the European Comission to get of Microsoft's back if they say: "you don't like our Media Player, then we won't sell our products in the EU". Probably like 2 days. I wish they really did this, cause this whole monopolies-hiding-around-every-corner-waiting-to-rape-the-consumer stuff makes me sick. See, as a microsoft customer i am not especially happy about them wasting billions because of some Brussels (or DC) retards instead of delivering products i want. Also, I surely am not happy about this as a MS shareholder.
I agree Silverlight is probably better than Flash, but that's setting a rather low bar.
Agreed - this is setting the bar low. A much better bar would be SVG. The 1.2 draft already supports every feature in Flash or Silverlight and is completely open (comes from the people who made HTML if this is new to you). It's completely xml based with the same DOM programming interface as HTML allowing AJAX as we're now seeing for HTML.
And here's where Microsoft is at fault:
SVG is probably already supported to some degree in your browser natively without any plugins (unless your primative enough to still be using IE) which is because Microsoft has been passively refusing to include it in its browser - presumable because it IS a direct competitor to Silverlight. Check out the MSDN thread about it's support that's been running since 2006 with no proper response.
I thought MSFT incorporated in Ireland so they wouldn't have to bother with those pesky US taxes? So please don't blame us in the USA for MSFT since they are as big of a tax dodging multinational corp as Halliburton. But I just don't understand why anyone would WANT to use silverlight. Didn't anybody learn anything from "playsforsure"? The second MSFT has the monopoly they'll bring out "Silverlight 4.0-Now only for Windows 9 SE!" and everyone else will get boned again. Oh well, history and repeat and all that jazz. Some folks just don't ever learn.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Silverlight supports Firefox as well as it supports IE on both Windows and MacOS.
I do not remember the last time I even used IE on Windows to browse the web, and there have been *no* sites that use Silverlight that fail under firefox (we try a lot of them when looking for the "next sample to get working on Moonlight" from http://silverlight.net/Showcase).
If what you were implying though was that Moonlight 2.0 was not ready to run Silverlight 2.0 content, you are right. Moonlight, the open source version of Silverlight is not yet ready to render all of the 2.0 content, but it is very close to it.
Perhaps the Portugal government would like to fund the accelerated development of Moonlight by hiring a few developers to assist the project. That seems like a win-win for everyone involved. Faster Moonlight 2.0 and 3.0 and the warm cozy feeling that they made the world a better place.