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Mono Abandons Open Source Silverlight

Posted by Soulskill on from the singing-in-an-empty-theater dept.

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.'"

26 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Netflix by jakimfett · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

    --
    Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
    1. Re:Netflix by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yeah. OSX, too. HA! A joke. MS spend years and many tens of millions to derail the corpulent and putrid hulk that is Adobe Flash. Instead, they manage to build a custom DRM container for NetFlix, as the sole volume partner/customer.

      Anybody else who tried walking out on this limb, wound up getting screwed, per the usual MS bait-and-wait.

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    2. Re:Netflix by King+InuYasha · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    3. Re:Netflix by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You don't have to implement Silverlight, just the audio/video codecs and one of several possible transports. Silverlight builds on the pre-existing Microsoft Media infrastructure. For example, in many cases I can transcode a Silverlight audio stream by connecting to the legacy RTSP transport and decoding the Windows Media Audio packets. Neither FFmpeg nor GStreamer can do this, because while they have good codec support they have shit transport support.

      I've build a custom HTTP/RTSP library and ASF decoder, and then heavily refactored the WMA decoder from FFmpeg. In fact, I've written a daemon which can transcode Windows Media Audio and Flash FLV/FLA audio (plus the easy ones, like Shoutcast and vanilla RTSP), and transcode in real-time for whatever the connecting device requires (various HTTP streaming formats, RTSP, etc; and from, e.g. WMA to Vorbis).

      The daemon is both event oriented and multi-process. I can transcode (with resampling) 4 live broadcasts and reflect to 50+ clients while using a fraction of the CPU a browser takes just to playback one stream. Again, FFmpeg, GStreamer, and VLC have all the wrong optimizations for this kind of scaling. Internet media streaming is still in the dark ages.

    4. Re:Netflix by ZeroSumHappiness · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Netflix by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    6. Re:Netflix by Guspaz · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  2. Same old microsoft by LingNoi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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..

    1. Re:Same old microsoft by djdanlib · · Score: 5, Funny

      Google surely wouldn't create a Buzz in the marketplace unless they were sure their product would be the Wave of the future, would they? ;)

      Some of us are in fact non-Plussed by their entirely-too-sanitary products...

    2. Re:Same old microsoft by poetmatt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Same old microsoft by Sarten-X · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
    4. Re:Same old microsoft by Darinbob · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  3. Bad sign for good technology by TheNucleon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Silverlight really is a well thought out technology. It does a great job of abstracting the presentation layer from the code, and is pleasant to program. The tools for developing in Silverlight are nice, too. Too bad that it is showing signs of fading away - I think it had a lot of potential.

    --
    My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
    1. Re:Bad sign for good technology by cpu6502 · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

      --
      My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
    2. Re:Bad sign for good technology by Sarten-X · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
  4. Am I a bad person? by demachina · · Score: 5, Funny

    Am I a bad person to experience a Schadenfreude rush everytime Miguel, Facebook, Zynga or Groupon fails?

    --
    @de_machina
    1. Re:Am I a bad person? by Col.+Klink+(retired) · · Score: 4, Funny

      > Am I a bad person to experience a Schadenfreude rush everytime Miguel, Facebook, Zynga or Groupon fails?

      There's a whole online support group for people like us.

      --

      -- Don't Tase me, bro!

  5. .NET != Silverlight by Empiric · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It isn't terribly surprising that Mono is abandoning Silverlight, since Microsoft seems to be doing much the same in favor of HTML 5.

    The .NET Framework and tools in totality are a different story, though.

    By the way, for those who haven't looked at it recently, MonoDevelop has come a -long- way. It's feature-comparable to Visual Studio, nowadays.

    --
    ~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
  6. HTML5 convergence by johanwanderer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:HTML5 convergence by ArhcAngel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
    2. Re:HTML5 convergence by jimshatt · · Score: 4, Funny

      Didn't you hear HTML is going on a fast release cycle too? Actually, in ten years we'll have HTML22.04 "Horrid Hypertext" (October release will be "Imbecile Interwebs")

  7. No. Shit. by EjectButton · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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."
    If only someone could have warned you, oh wait someone did, _everyone_ in the world who has paid any attention to Microsoft's behavior over the last 20 years.

    Miguel has supported:
    the Microsoft "partnership" with Novell (disaster for Novell in the community)
    OOXML/docx (deliberately obfuscated format mess)
    C# (has a constant vague patent cloud over it that he dismisses)
    Moonlight/Silverlight (a patent-encumbered flash clone, in an era when flash is going away, now shown to be a bad idea)

    I used to wonder if Miguel was a Microsoft plant, now I wonder if he just has a learning disability.

  8. Yes and No by pavon · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:How do we strong arm Ultra Violet distributors by Microlith · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  10. DRM vs. locked bootloaders by Rob+Y. · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
    1. Re:DRM vs. locked bootloaders by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.