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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.'"
What about Macs, and Moonlight. Granted Using Silverlight is a stupid move done by STUPID Developers, and braindead PHB. But still if you wanted to do bidding you had ways.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Good for Portugal. It is about time some country stood up for quality closed-source software in the face of all you open-source zealots who won't take total cost of ownership into account.
Yeah, because no one here is biased...
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
> This is due to the use of Silverlight 2.0 technology by the company,
> Vortal, contracted to build the e-procurement portal.
I'm sure the bid said, "accessible via any computer with a web browser"? Or "apps available under x, y, and z OS's", or some such?
Quite frankly, although Microsoft getting people dependent on their proprietary APIs is a common business model, this isn't really Microsoft's fault, but Vortal's. Or the doof who put together the RFQ for this particular service for not being more specific about what kinds of computers can access it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Silverlight is a wonderful programming platform, easier and more elegant than flash will ever be
That's nice and everything, but anyone using Flash OR Silverlight as a required part of a tendering process needs to be put down for the good of humanity. What could possibly have been going on in their tiny little minds? Responding to this insanity by babbling about Silverlight being better than Flash is absurd.
Silverlight comes along offering nothing new but plenty of obstacles and lock-out of end user browsers, requiring active download of a plug-in, and yet, there are bozos out there willing to commit paying customers and their websites to an endless, costly, non-standard nightmare in exchange for nothing! You can't make shit like that up, it's real.
...and when Microsoft has wrapped your entire world into a compendium of proprietary digital glop with no hope of improvement, only then will you realize how bad it can be.
...again.
Most of the stuff on
It's not about the quality of Silverlight, if you didn't get it go read again.
People with other Operating Systems other than those provided by Microsoft are not able to access a governmental website, that is what is being discussed.
Mono will always be behind and you can count on MacOSX support being dropped quite soon. Using Silverlight now is no different than what using activeX meant in the past.
And even better, if you don't work for Novell, and use it via Mono, you might even get sued! Yay for patent-encumbered software that relies on the goodwill of a multiple-conviction monopolist.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Really, that saying was a saying? The old saying was "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM." I don't know if it is still true, but it had the advantage of being true for longer than Microsoft has been a company.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
If you really had one you would be using Lynx or HyperLink. So STFU and GTFO.
I agree Silverlight is probably better than Flash, but that's setting a rather low bar.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Yes.
Quite frankly, although Microsoft getting people dependent on their proprietary APIs is a common business model, this isn't really Microsoft's fault, but Vortal's.
Well, sort of. Remember that ongoing prosecution of MS in the EU courts for antitrust abuse? Remember what it is about? MS intentionally broke interoperability with Web standards and prevented Web standards from advancing and being more functional on the majority of user's systems by leveraging their Windows monopoly to artificially promote IE. As a result, it is harder for companies like Vortal to implement a procurement system using Web standards, resulting in more companies using Silverlight (and Flash). But since Silverlight is another Microsoft product... well hopefully you see where this is going.
You can argue Vortal should not have used Silverlight for this project and I'd agree with you. That doesn't mean MS bears no guilt for making developing this with interoperable Web standards artificially difficult for Vortal.
Work for Novell? The Novell-Microsoft agreement does not protect Novell in anyway from being sued. It protects Novell's clients.
I suppose Flash is much better supported on Linux. Hmmm. Yes there are flash versions, but Adobe took their sweet time about it, did they not?
I'm not a FAN of silverlight (or flash!), but Silverlight seems to be better supported on Linux and Mac than Flash was initially. I could be wrong about that.
I don't undrestand why Microsoft gets blamed for producing a product that isn't supported on platforms that Windows isn't supported on. I may as well complain that it took forEVER for Amarok to get Windows support, and it's STILL not available! Or, even better, that Safari took forEVER to be ported to Windows! Or whatever other software you care to complain about.
If developers choose to use a MS only product, that's not MS's fault. Ms is under no obligation to produce software that works with everyone's, including their competitors, operating system. That makes no sense, monopoly or no monopoly. Now, if they were forcing the developers to use Silverlight, or forcing Adobe not to let Flash have a Windows version, that's different.
I have a commodore_64 for which has been working just fine for me for many many years, but I am told that I must have a "web browser" in order to post comments to the Slashdot web site.
Don't worry dude, I've got you covered!
And forcing people to use Silverlight is nothing like that. There's no good reason to use Silverlight (or Flash for that matter) on a site that easily be done without nonstandard plugins. Remember when they used to do that 10+ years ago? Every site had its own pet video, audio, or other single-purpose wonky player. We're beyond those days, with the notable exception of Flash. Does anyone really want to go back?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Sadly, we have yet to understand the full repercussions of Suffixgate, but I suspect they will be with us for a long, long time.
Breakfast served all day!
I'm more shocked to learn that the -gate postfix is used outside of the US! Or, indeed, even English-speaking countries!
Oh, but it is.
We even use colgate around here.
And even better, if you don't work for Novell, and use it via Mono, you might even get sued! Yay for patent-encumbered software that relies on the goodwill of a multiple-conviction monopolist.
Bu... But Microsoft products are an IT industry standard.
... I must object to these allegations in the strongest terms. Our QA department went above and beyond the call of duty to ensure compatibility, by testing our software not only on HP and Dell computers, but also Lenovo, Sony, and Acer. Whatever objections these critics have are clearly spurious.
If the company were Chinese would that make you happier?
You shouldn't have to pay to use a government website. Especially not someone in a different country.
Am I asking too much?
Speaking as a portuguese, I can tell you that the whole "-gate" postfixing is senseless.. It just doesn't carry weight around here as it does over there. I'd wager the submitter knew this, but just added it anyway because a) he/she is "close" to the matter (probably belongs to the group who's denouncing the situation) and therefore takes this issue seriously and b) wanted to exarcerbate the impact of this news piece by way of a commonly used word-gimmick.. After all, your own media abuses the term whenever some sort of scandal crops up.
As far as "-gate" scandals go, there's another one a LOT more prone to getting that tag (allegations of impropriety or downright corruption that may implicate the current Prime-Minister regarding the licensing of a big real estate development when he was Minister for the Environment -- and therefore had specific oversight on these matters), a huge mess. And even THAT didn't get tagged "Freeport-gate". It would mean nothing to the majority of people here, many would probably not even get the historical reference (even with "Frost vs Nixon").
To be honest, and again speaking as a portuguese citizen, this is the first I'm hearing about it (and the first time I've heard about this particular portal, to be frank). As far as I can tell, this relates to a governmental portal for job procurement/hiring.. The "bidding" here either relates to companies wishing to offer services, applying for consulting positions (getting contracts) or for people trying to get employed.
It's obviously a Bad Thing(TM) but I doubt it was done intentionally and even less that MS had anything to do with it. Not that MS is above this, of course, and they do enjoy a cosy relationship with Portugal and portuguese institutions (we're a small country and they're a BIIIIG corporation -- it's "good business" to keep a major player/investor like that happy, however it may sicken me that we need it) but as other posters have pointed out, this is Vortal's own doing.
Silverlight is a new technology and Microsoft has been investing heavily around here.. I personally know many aspiring developers (as well as fully-fledged software engineers) who genuinely think Microsoft is God's gift to software engineering.. And it doesn't help that MS does indeed get some things right now and then. :)
The way I see it, whomever made the decision to use SL (and the ensuing IE-optimized html code -- even the places you can go without Silverlight installed really suck with Firefox, the usability/interoperability is seriously broken) didn't think things through, or honestly felt that Silverlight is the Next Big Thing(TM), and that going with it would be a clever move.
It's another reflection of the worst thing that Microsoft has managed to instill into so many people, often through the deals they broker with education institutions: the mono-culture mentality.. That only Windows matters (in fact, for nearly all non-CS students, Windows is pretty much IT, and even Apple has only recently begun to show up on their mental map). That as long as you develop for THEIR platform and use their technologies, you'll reach that huge percentage of users, the magic Windows OS desktop-share.. And that the rest basically don't matter. It's so sad seeing this happen in the very places that used to be all about inclusion, early adoption of ALL technologies and diversity.
The submitter over-dramatized the impact that this is having over here, but I'm glad that the complaint went through and hope they can coax the European Courts to issue a legally binding EU-wide mandate on interoperability.
It is rude of them to commune by flux shifting in front of those whose Vortal inputs are impaired. They should vocalize in our auditory language as a matter of courtesy. Unless they wish to say unflattering things about us. Just so.
No, the HUNDREDS of other people in this discussion pointing out that Moonlight is trailing Silverlight feature-wise and that Silverlight 2.0 code CAN NOT run on Moonlight currently, have not forgotten Moonlight.
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
Of course, if it doesn't, you have the source so fix it yourself.
And the specs to see what needs to be complied to? Oh wait...
Here be signatures
I do internal development, on a controlled environment, and I have been pushing for moving to Silverlight for the last 3 months or so.
Our users are demanding more 'Web 2.0' styled interfaces, but we're currently supporting IE 5.5, 6, 7, FF 3, and a handful of Opera users.
The incredible mish-mash of CSS/HTML/Javascript/ASP.Net/AJAX/JQuery can do it sure. But it is a royal pain in the ass. The design paradigm looks like something out of a Dr Sues book.
By switching to Silverlight we gain all of the UI features (and more) in a single language that is in the core-competency of the development team. For us, it makes sense. For external sites, it would be a bigger risk until SL gets Flash like penetration.
Comparing SL to Flash though, I think SL is off to a much better start. Both are proprietary. Both have some type of "Open Source" (a lol-worthy quote) model from MS/Adobe. At least we can see the code inside the black box.
SL 1.0 was released for Windows/Mac September 2007.
ML 1.0 was released for Linux January 2009.
About 16 months to get Linux caught up.
Flash 7 (MX04) for Linux was released what, some time back in 2004?
Flash 8 wasn't released for linux (and it wasn't backwards compatible with 7)
Flash 9 was released for Windows/Max late 2006.
Flash 9 was released for Linux early 2007.
About 3 years to get Linux caught up.
It's hard to pull up release dates from before then, but given the current state of Flash on Linux (a mild jump up from pure crap), I can't imagine their support a decade ago was anything more than laughable.
Seeing the Moonlight team's progress so far, and the apparent ease of access they have to Microsoft and the Silverlight team, it seems like the jump to Moonlight 2.0 isn't going to be a 3 year delay like the jump from Flash 7 to Flash 9 was for Linux. And once Moonlight 2.0 is running, further jumps to the inevitable SL 3.0 will likely hinge more on the Mono project keeping up with the 4.0 version of the .Net Framework.
Using either Silverlight or Flash in inappropriate situations is dumb. But the existence of Silverlight and the competition it creates for Flash will truly only improve the functionality of rich browser applications (what I've been trying to get coined as 'Chubby clients').
-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
Are we all forgetting about Moonlight?
Okay, other people clued you in about this.
...while retaining no licensing snafus.
That's a really hard assertion to prove.
Basically, you're all letting your fanboy rage over Microsoft blind your sense to the point that you're pushing a fully proprietary non-oss solution (flash) over a fully open source solution.
Who's promoting Flash? This could be done in Java or javascript even using all open Web standards. Failing that, Flash is not being promoted by a criminal organization whose trust gives them direct, financial incentive to break compatibility with other versions. Finally, Adobe pushing the proprietary Flash upon the industry is not illegal since they aren't abusing a monopoly in another market to do it.
As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter how much better the development is made by tools, docs, and language, or how open source the project is... all that matters is Microsoft affiliation.
Not at all. I'm just as opposed to other antitrust abuse from other companies as I am to abuse from MS. Most other people seem to feel the same. Take a look at discussions about local cable and phone monopolies, for example.
So slashdot isn't necessarily pro-linux, pro-oss, or pro-free software. It's just anti-microsoft.
Slashdot is not homogenous, but a lot of people are very vocal about MS. MS has given them good reason. This is primarily a computing forum and MS has done more damage to various parts of the computing industry via their criminal acts than pretty much any other company. Had Slashdot been around during the bad old days you'd have been claiming it was just an anti-IBM site.
Here's the final word: if Microsoft is beating the Adobe toolchain in a cost-benefit-analysis, then more people should volunteer on Moonlight...
I'd say if MS is beating them without breaking the law... which is highly unlikely if you understand antitrust law. Even then it is debatable.
My experience with Moonlight on Debian Lenny under Iceweasel:
I play a game called Conquer Club (online Risk). There are greasemonkey scripts for getting data and one of them uses Silverlight to draw graphs. I figured I'd try it. I get linked to the MS site, which routes me to the Moonlight home. I click the install and the plugin is dropped into my browser. Easy enough. I go back to the page that required Silverlight... doesn't detect it. I click on the Silverlight "get it now" picture and my browser crashes because the Silverlight site tries to push some codecs onto my machine.
I'm still waiting to be impressed by Silverlight in some way on Linux. On the other hand, my 64-bit beta Flash plug-in works great even though I had to manually place it in a plug in folder on my machine.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Microsoft nearly did kill Office for the Mac, but was a required part of a dispute settlement. Now, it's too profitable to kill off. That's called a dilemma.
MSOffice for the Mac is profitable, but not so much that MS could not kill it if they thought it strategic. The reason they don't is because it would not be a good move for them. Nearly everyone knows MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's, but they also have monopoly influence on the office suite software market. They've spent huge amounts of money in settlements making sure no court case ever gets to the point where that is an official ruling, but it is true nonetheless. It is one of their largest lock-ins to prevent Linux adoption which is why they have been fighting open standard formats so hard and in such a dirty fashion. It's also their business plan going forward for software as a service.
Losing the entire Mac chunk of the market would do a lot undermine their ability to maintain that monopoly influence going forward. It would almost instantly triple the market for alternative office suites and MS really, really doesn't want that to happen.
Really, that saying was a saying? The old saying was "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM."
MS replaced IBM in the saying in the 90s, in what I am certain was a campaign by MS sales agents.
The enemies of Democracy are
LOL, MS discontinued IE for Mac, so they're going to discontinue Silverlight. Yup, that's bulletproof.
It certainly isn't bulletproof, but it is MS's tried and true business strategy. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Once they have sufficient market share for a technology and the competition is hosed, they tend to make those technologies exclusive to their platform. It's not just IE.
You seem to forget Microsoft attitude towards software patents and Linux. Microsoft is allowing a (mostly unfunctional) implementation of Silverlight in order to get the perception of it being cross platform, but at some point, and by murphy's law it will be the worst time for your deployment, they will pull the patents card from their sleve.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Sometime later this year according to the GP.
Why use any proprietary system which reaches 70% of the people when you can use Standards and reach 100% of the people? I fault the idiots who can't recognize the trap this is.
The other possibility is the people who spec this system are too young to recall how bad it was under the heyday of the Microsoft Dictatorship. Development stalled, bugs went unpatched, exploits soared, functionality went down, costs went up, better technologies died etc. Now, the younger generation doesn't believe you when you refer to Microsoft as the Evil Overlord. It's just another vendor now.
I guess we have come a long way.
Most of the stuff on
Who supports HTML 5? It's not even a complete standard. So it's hardly specified much less implemented.
There is an implementable draft and it is partly implemented by basically all the browsers except IE. The point being, we're talking about pushing new technologies (which Silverlight 2 is) to solve the problem. Not that new technologies are needed, mind you, that was just for the sake of illustrating the point.
Are you honestly suggesting a non-existent solution vs. an existent and supported one?
I'm not suggesting anyone implement anything in any particular technology. I'm mentioning that MS's actions in promoting Silverlight are probably illegal and this is evidence of damages.
RTFA. The Portugal Free Software Wingbat club is challenging it to a governing body.
You RTFA. From TFA: "The gravity of this situation gave rise to a written statement sent to the European Commission." The EU commission is handling the ongoing antitrust prosecution of MS.
This is a rather unique situation- you see, the open source platform kind of sucks. It pushes absolutely godawful technology from the 70's and 80's and gets by based on its ability to run a web browser.
That's no unique at all. Monopoly abuse removes the financial incentive to invest in making good competitors. It is to be expected. It retards innovation and artificially makes competing technologies work more poorly due to interoperability issues.
Apple is a great example of the fact that there's more to this than monopoly- they are gaining market share by making a better product, not by forcing their product to be bundled in a court of law.
Economics wasn't your best class was it? Apple is gaining market share by bypassing the desktop OS market entirely and refusing to license their OS to OEMs, while making desktop systems (a market which is not monopolized).
. Firefox gained market share by actually beating IE 6, and then IE 7 to a lesser extent, and even IE 8, to an even lesser extent.
Yeah they only have a vastly superior product and have for many years and it has netted them what 20%? Yeah, sounds like the market is working great.
Still: no monopoly could stop technical excellence, because the competition is hardly held down.
Yeah, don't remember why we have antitrust laws do you. Your assertion is proven false by history and contradicts every economic model with any credibility.
Free market capitalism is free market, monopoly control is technically socialism- not that I don't support it.
No, that is not socialism, either in the political or economic sense. Monopolies being abused are similar to socialism in that they remove the incentive for innovation and efficiency, but dissimilar in that they are controlled by a company whose goal is profit instead of by the people through their government theoretically for the greater good.
Actually, there's really no official reason that the w3c is in charge of the web- it's just a group of businesses. It's only recently been a web of standards- for the most part, those standards are pushed by various other companies who pull strings in the coalition. The web standards are a tremendous and unreadable mess...
The W3C and written standards are pretty much beside the point. Web technologies have not moved forward because MS is not financially motivated to make them do so and is motivated to hold them back. MS helped write a lot of those standards before writing intentionally noncompliant versions. Did you not pay attention to the facts unearthed by their court case in the US?
The moderators are just other people like you, who think like you. It's user moderated, and the users on this site are mostly idiots- not engineers, designers, or developers; just s
And sliverlight runs under what broswers? It will run under IE 5.5 right? Why not just demand all your users get Firefox 3/Opera/Safari 4 and write cutting edge CSS3 pages with XML and SVG for all those cool effects. The only browser that's broken is IE. Yet every body jumps to the "microsoft only" solution as the savior to the problem??? Why???
Its the fault of the government asshole making some dough on the side by choosing a provider without making sure that they comply with what should be minimal government procurement practice for public facing electronic trading.
Same in portugal as anywhere i guess.
NO SIG
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.
I wouldn't worry a whole lot. There's room for so much improvement in their offerings that (are you listening, semi-rich person who's wondering where to put their money?) you could invest in improving GRASS, repackage it with a sharp UI, and make a fucking mint. Basically, GIS is too big for one company to contain. It's going to blow up in probably three or four years, just judging by the rapid clue-getting by people who do actual work.
It's such a shame that people don't see what a huge impact GIS will have on their lives. This is the second coming of the internet, people. Now is your chance.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Why do you think all this CSS/Javascript/HTML/Ajax/whatever doesn't work in allo those browsers, it's because of what Microsoft did.
This is probably the worst reason to go with Microsoft-technology, because you know you will just create an evironment where it easier for them to create the same bad situation all over again.
Don't push Silverlight, push Firefox or something. Use open standards. Maybe use Firefox Prism.
Just so you know, there are MSI-packages of Firefox for Windows as well if you need them.
Hell, getting people from IE-old to IE8 would be a large improvement.
New things are always on the horizon
Had you ever actually done any work with XML and SVG you'd know that the browser support they have is no comparison to Flash, and I presume Silverlight (I refuse to look at it so I know no specifics about it).
The company I work for uses a Flash based system to get some things done, Adobe has killed part of what that system used for generating dynamic Flash content, I.E. Macromedia Generator. The OSS/Free clone isn't capable of what we want to do, and rather than fixing it up and proping up a retarded and closed application, we opted for going the XML + SVG + Javascript + A bunch of other crap in order to replace the flash portions.
As the lead developer I'm aware of the problems porting our system over to using standards instead of Flash.
If you think for a minute that SVG + SMIL + A host of other crap is any competition for Flash, then you have never worked with them both. You may have worked with one, but certainly not both.
SVG could have been a Flash replacement, but its not. They missed too many things, most notably, sound. Yes, SVG is a vector graphics standard, but it was created with the purpose of making Flash pointless. This was before Adobe bought Macromedia and they were looking to beat Macromedia in this area. This is also why Adobe made the Adobe Graphics Server, which is capable of doing a lot of what Generator does, but on PSDs, AIs, PDFs and SVGs (as well as some stuff to basic images as well). Note: AGS has been killed as well, with no direct replacement as yet.
So back to the point. I use SVG A LOT. Our entire product line now uses SVG to generate pretty much every image that is put into our websites or services. Most of those images contain dynamic content, animation, ect.
SVG + whatever other 'Standards' you want to throw at it, that work in a browser (any browser for that matter) are no match for Flash as a whole.
Its great to support standards, but if the standards don't do what you need/want to do, then whats the point of supporting them? Especially when not supporting them is less painful to everyone involved than supporting them, with the exception handful of people who scream 'standards compliance or die!!!'
Typically, demanding that your customers do something is not a good way to make a sale. If the 'demand' means little or no work to most of them because everyone already does it, thats one thing. Demanding your users do something different than their daily routine which they know and love is a lot more difficult to sell.
You prefer some browser other than IE, yes? And you get upset when someone demands you use IE, yes? You are a minority. Like it or not, IE is the leader. So what business in their right mind is going favor the minority over the majority, just on principal? We're not talking about standing up against racism here either, no sane business leader is going to be standing up for principals and pissing off his users right now. The nut jobs who do decide to do that now are probably going to go out of business soon, with the exception of maybe Ballmer, he could probably get by with it.
I LOVE using SVG over Flash for what I do. The ability to manipulate the presentation so easily using XML parsers makes dynamic content creation actually logical and easy to program for.
You will however, never see me comparing any current or currently proposed SVG standards to Flash. Its just not there. And that ignores all the actual browser and plugin incompatibilities between SVG implementations.
Remember, SVG rendering is much like HTML rendering. There is of course a standard, and a set of rules, but those rules can still be interpreted differently by different people, and implementations have bugs and missing features, the SVG spec is large and complex, no one supports everything, let alone supporting it the same wa
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Moonlight only exists because MS have disclosed most of the implementation details to them, it still lags a long way behind the MS implementation and isn't 100% compatible anyway.
Moonlight exists because we were able to put a prototype together in 21 days (you can read about our hack-a-thon here: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jun-21.html).
Microsoft has since helped us by providing licensed codecs that can be used by Linux users; Providing us with Silverlight specs for a full open source impleentation (Although 100% of it is available on the web at msdn.microsoft.com) and they provided us with test suites to ensure that Moonlight passes every single Silverlight test suite that Microsoft uses internally.
No two implementations will be 100% compatible. In fact even fixing a bug means that version a and version a.0.0.0.1 with the bug fixed are not "100% compatible", so there is not much point in arguing about 100% compatibility in the first case, it is easy to prove that this will never be the case. But in that regard, no piece of software will ever be (not the kernel, not the browsers, not anything that ever gets bug fixed as a platform).
But we can get very close to the indented behavior as articulated in the test suites "This is what it is supposed to do as far as -we- humans could guarantee". There will certainly be bugs, but we do not have a problem fixing those, and the Microsoft engineers have been very helpful in answering any questions we might have.