Mono Abandons Open Source Silverlight

mikejuk writes "The Mono project is about the only group of people actively talking up .NET and developing it, but in an interview Miguel de Icaza has admitted that Moonlight, the Mono version of Silverlight, isn't worth the effort any more. He said, 'Silverlight has not gained much adoption on the web, so it did not become the must-have technology that I thought [it] would have to become. And Microsoft added artificial restrictions to Silverlight that made it useless for desktop programming. These days we no longer believe that Silverlight is a suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology, there are just too many limitations for it to be useful.'"

Comments

Netflix

[jakimfett]

Now, if only Netflix would abandon it so that I don't have to boot into windows to watch movies...if it can be done for android, why not PC?

Re:Netflix

[King InuYasha]

Netflix on Android and iOS use raw video streams. No DRM or other funny business.

Re:Netflix

[TheRaven64]

LoveFilm in the UK just switched from Flash to Silverlight, because of reason 2: the studios refused to keep licensing them for streaming with Flash, believing that Silverlight was somehow more secure (which it probably is, on the basis that it's so unpopular that no one as yet has cared enough to crack it). This has effectively rendered their streaming useless to me, as neither of the machines that I want to stream video to run a Silverlight-supported OS.

Re:Netflix

[Guspaz]

It is, of course, impossible that Netflix might have chosen Silverlight because of technical reasons, such as the effectiveness and seamless nature of its bitrate scaling support... If memory serves, the browser-based alternatives to Silverlight for this functionality at the time they switched didn't work as well.

No, it's obviously a conspiracy. Microsoft isn't capable of developing an effective platform for anything.

Yes and No

[pavon]

Silverlight (and XNA, and Windows Phone 7, etc) basically refer to overlapping collections of .NET libraries (often referred to as profiles) which different environments support. The set of libraries that Xamarin provides for Android development is a superset of the libraries available in Silverlight 4. However the intent isn't for you to write Silverlight applications that happen to run on Android. The idea is to write all your common code using the .NET Base Class Libraries (BCL; which are included in the ECMA standard), and then write your interface using (wrappers) around the native libraries for Android (or iOS or WP7 or Silverlight or WPF or ASP), for each platform you release on.

Re:How do we strong arm Ultra Violet distributors

[Microlith]

The funniest part about that Talk page is that "JimTheFrog" is, according to his user page:

Jim Taylor is Head of Technology and Product Development for UltraViolet/DECE, the online entertainment equivalent to DVD and Blu-ray.

So basically, that entire talk page is about the lead of that DRM-centric disaster defending what is fundamentally a customer-hostile technology. I'd call him a shill but he's probably tasked with "maintaining the message" on places like Wikipedia to make UltraViolet seem less fundamentally shitty than it is. And his dickish attitude towards Linux seems unsurprising, given that he

was DVD Evangelist at Microsoft.

Re:DRM vs. locked bootloaders

[tlhIngan]

That's why the Nook Tablet came with a locked bootloader, whereas the original Nook Color spawned a large ROM'mer community. Netflix required it in order to let them use their app. I think I'd rather deal with DRM for paid downloads than have my whole device locked down.

If you want Netflix HD you need a locked down Android. Netflix (with standard def) is available for all Androids - locked or not. It's why the Nook tablet's netflix video is better than the Kindle Fire's - the Fire's drawing from the SD low res stream, the Nook from the HD stream.