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

Same old microsoft

[LingNoi]

1) Create new technology
2) Market the hell out of it
3) Everyone gets hyped up, next big thing etc
4) Microsoft drops technology
5) repeat step 1

This has been their standard order of business for decades. Watch for the same thing to happen to "Metro" Microsoft's latest big thing..

Re:Same old microsoft

[poetmatt]

Actually, 3 is wrong.

In this case 3 was: nobody wanted this shit ever, forever and ever. People warned and warned and warned it was horrible, and Miguel along with Florian were the only people pushing for "oh, this is great, and it's open source!" (while not mentioning it was like 2+ years behind the entire time and MS would deliberately only support the latest versions) 4 and 5 still occur.

Same thing with windows ME, windows 8, the Ribbon bar, games for windows live, DRM pushed by intel/MS, etc.

Re:Same old microsoft

[Sarten-X]

Like most R&D-heavy companies, Google will promote and hype their new product, but if it doesn't take off, it'll die a quiet death. Their successful products will be promoted continually, as a means to build up the brand.

Microsoft, on the other hand, promotes its new technology, and when nobody cares, they promote it more, deprecate the old system, tack on a new name, integrate it with their next new project, then finally declare it deprecated (but still fully supported) when the new replacement comes out.

Re:Same old microsoft

[sjames]

MS isn't the only offender, they're just the only offender to try using it for OS lo0ck-in and then throwing their weight around trying to cram it down people's throats.

Google creates a lot of things. Some stick, some are dropped. Some die quietly and just fade away. They tend to be multi-platform right out of the gate.

Re:Same old microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

What I've noticed is that it's gotten worse since Bill Gates left Microsoft to Steve Ballmer. I'm guessing this has a lot to do with the fact that BillG was quite able to evaluate the technical merits of different proposals, while SteveB was not. BillG could act as a filter between the research teams that need to come up with the Next Big Thing (TM) to justify their existence and the MS marketing machine that is quite capable of hyping just about anything in the press.

Bill Gates thought the internet was a fad and tried to push their own closed wall AOL style web.
Microsoft got to the top of the computing world by adopting a criminal behaviour for decades. Whatever standard of excellence there was in Redmond (and it's hugely debatable) we'll never know since MS hasn't been able to compete honestly ever. Not a single time. Microsoft is a criminal enterprise from top to bottom.

Re:Same old microsoft

[Darinbob]

The difference is that when Google does this everybody yawns (except for the 10 or so who post blogs about how game changing it will be). But when Microsoft does this for a half-finished technology of theirs, everybody starts to go nuts and IT houses start hiring people with 5 years experience in it, all the analysts claim you need to have it, corporations create internal policies regarding it, and the Mono team starts investigating a cross platform version.

Ahh!

[gQuigs]

I'm no fan of .NET, but I'm pretty sure the Mono developers aren't the only ones using it.

He is saying there is no future for Silverlight (the .NET based web plugin), not all of .NET. And that they won't put resouces into developing Moonlight (the open source version of Silverlight).

...or maybe I was the only one confused by the summary....

I know of two sites that use Silverlight, netflix and xfinity. They both use it just for the Microsoft DRM, afaik.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[cpu6502]

I thought the necessity for Silverlight (and Flash) was obsoleted by HTML 5? I think both these programs need to disappear.

HTML5 convergence

[johanwanderer]

This is just another sign of the industry converging to HTML5 as the primary display API. Flash is going away, now Silverlight is, too. Hopefully the companies will increase their efforts to allow users / developers to migrate existing applications to the new API.

Re:HTML5 convergence

[ArhcAngel]

Flash is going away,

Flash is the new IE6. Ten years from now corporations will still be clinging to it while everyone else is running HTML17.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Sarten-X]

Potential that could have been useful in, say, 1993...

Silverlight was supposed to be Microsoft's answer to Flash, but HTML 5 is already the generally-accepted answer to Flash. It was supposed to enable web-based applications to run on the desktop, but the widespread adoption of AJAX and other browser technologies has made that goal unnecessary, too. It was supposed to be a mechanism for Microsoft to claim dominance of up-and-coming technologies, but it's just yet another failure on Ballmer's running list of "too little, too late" achievements.

Re:Netflix

[poetmatt]

What they don't use: silverlight. I don't know what they do, but it's explicitly not that.

I can only wonder how much money was under the table from MS to get netflix to do this, in the face of common sense.

Re:Am I a bad person?

[OzPeter]

Absolutely Not.

I was actually kind of giddy when Facebook shares started dropping the first day out.

I just head they are predicting $25 by mid-summer.

By mid summer?? It's $28 and falling TODAY

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[BaronAaron]

The various browser implementations of HTML5 still haven't matured enough to reliably replace browser plugins in all cases. Specifically video playback support is still a mess due to all the codec patent issues. A recent project I worked on required us to encode the video in three different formats to cover all the major browsers. If we used Flash we would have only had to encode once. There is also no DRM solution for HTML5 video. This is a non-starter for many streaming companies like Netflix.

HTML5 get better everyday though, it's only a matter of time.

Re:Netflix

[ZeroSumHappiness]

Netflix isn't getting paid off by MS for this. There are two interesting aspects to the Netflix-on-Linux problem, one obvious, one not.

Obvious problem: Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix is on the board of directors of Microsoft. This, almost definitely, gives him sips of kool-aid and some self-interest in growing Microsoft's market share for its pet projects.

Non-obvious problem: The studios that actually own all the distribution rights to the videos on Netflix are, for the most part, wary about DRM on Linux, under the belief that obscurity grants security. Now, we all know that's stupid, but we also all know they are stupid.

From what I understand, the actual minds at Netflix wanted a Linux product, know how to make it happen (to the point where they have internally tested it and it works) and would release it if it were feasible but the studios are hogtying them with contracts.