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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

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

[djdanlib]

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...

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.

Am I a bad person?

[demachina]

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

.NET != Silverlight

[Empiric]

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.

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.

No. Shit.

[EjectButton]

"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.