Mono developers to bring Silverlight to Linux (Ars Technica) [LWN.net]

Mono developers to bring Silverlight to Linux (Ars Technica)

Posted May 7, 2007 14:01 UTC (Mon) by kjp (subscriber, #39639) [Link]

You're not alone. I cringe every time "Miguel de Icaza, Vice President at Novell" announces something M$ related. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Mono developers to bring Silverlight to Linux (Ars Technica)

Posted May 9, 2007 22:56 UTC (Wed) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link]

You know the old saying - keep your friends backing away and your enemies incestuous... something like that, anyway.

Mono developers to bring Silverlight to Linux (Ars Technica)

Posted May 7, 2007 14:21 UTC (Mon) by Thalience (subscriber, #4217) [Link]

Because:

1) "the open source community" is not a monolithic decision making entity. Individual people and companies work on what they think is interesting and/or profitable.

2) It may help push Adobe in the direction of more support for free software, if their newest competitor has a good Free implementation.

Mono developers to bring Silverlight to Linux (Ars Technica)

Posted May 7, 2007 16:39 UTC (Mon) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link]

1) "the open source community" is not a monolithic decision making entity. Individual people and companies work on what they think is interesting and/or profitable.

Agreed. But in doing this work, Microsoft's approach is being vindicated. Thus proponents of open source software are vindicating a) the ignorance of established open specifications; and b) the development of non open source software.

(b) in particular seems somewhat counter productive. And okay, I've not read the license of this stuff, but it's hardly 3-clause BSD or LGPL is it?

Mono developers to bring Silverlight to Linux (Ars Technica)

Posted May 7, 2007 23:06 UTC (Mon) by Thalience (subscriber, #4217) [Link]

b) in particular seems somewhat counter productive. And okay, I've not read the license of this stuff, but it's hardly 3-clause BSD or LGPL is it?

I'm not sure what non-free software you refer to here. Is it the large amount of non-free software the will undoubtedly be written to target the Silverlight platform? If so, doesn't the same argument apply to the efforts to build a free Flash implementation? Or a Java environment? Or a c++ runtime??

If you mean the license of the Mono project's implementation of Silverlight, I don't see any indication (in the ArsTechnica article or elsewhere) that it will be under different licensing terms than the rest of Mono (which is a mix of GPL, LGPL and MIT-X11).

If you mean the MS Dynamic Language Runtime thingy, then I do suggest you read the terms of the MS-PL. It'll be a quick read, I promise. It is certainly a free software license.

With regard to point A, I do feel your pain about the lost opportunity for SVG. The world really does not need a new vector graphics markup language. But if the community as a whole were to boycott every standard that suffers from Not-Invented-Here syndrome, we would have few standards left to work on.

Mono developers to bring Silverlight to Linux (Ars Technica)

Posted May 7, 2007 14:49 UTC (Mon) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link]

IMHO, an open-source browser plugin from Novell is better than a closed-source browser plugin from Adobe.

one trick pony

Posted May 7, 2007 14:49 UTC (Mon) by ccyoung (subscriber, #16340) [Link]

Miguel de Icaza is doing what he thinks needs done - trying to make Linux work with most computers, and since most computers are MS, that means ...

nonetheless, what's tiresome is MS over and over and over again subverting standards to try to maintain market dominance - it's a one trick and very tiresome pony.

one trick pony

Posted May 7, 2007 15:39 UTC (Mon) by Brotherred (guest, #45141) [Link]

No what is wrong here is hacking free code for a development model that
is not a standard and may not ever be a standard if left alone. Why would
Migel try to push a closed codec when there are other options. Adobe's
approach to FOSS is not yet fully known however they are and have always
been a lot friendlier than MS. I see this as either missguided or an
attempt by a FOSS developer to kill Adobe's FOSS ambitions. Which just
gives me a head and stomach ache and makes me very very angry.

With friends like these

Posted May 7, 2007 15:53 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Are you sure Adobe is at all friendly to free software? Because they are the ones who put Sklyarov in jail, who threaten to sue developers that do not copy-protect their PDF specification, are behind the BSA big time and in general behave quite aggressively. Understandably too, since most if not all of their income follows a traditional proprietary model.

With friends like these

Posted May 7, 2007 20:16 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Adobe is just another propriatory software vendor.

They are no big deal either way except they make high profile applications that Windows technical sorts are into.

Personally I think that we should probably just stick with Flash over Microsoft's stuff. Microsoft can't be trusted and I realy doubt this stuff they are working on is ever going to go anywere.

The deal about Flash is that we already have open source pretty-close-to-working stuff for it.

But either way it still sucks.

With friends like these

Posted May 8, 2007 17:15 UTC (Tue) by NapalmLlama (guest, #26327) [Link]

> I realy doubt this stuff they are working on is ever going to go anywere.

Not until they bundle it with Vista's successor, (and stop bundling Flash), no.

With friends like these

Posted May 8, 2007 21:38 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Well that should give us another 5-7 years to come up with something new. :)

one trick pony

Posted May 8, 2007 6:05 UTC (Tue) by hawk (subscriber, #3195) [Link]

The "standard" being subverted in this case being Adobe's Flash?

Mono developers to bring Silverlight to Linux (Ars Technica)

Posted May 7, 2007 23:20 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]

SVG is not a replacement for Silverlight, or Flash, at all. SVG is nothing more than a 2D canvas description language. Even with animation support, it's nothing more than a 2D canvas description language with animation. Hook in JS, and with a lot of code, you could put together some kind of funky widget. Still not a replacement for Silverlight, or Flash.

Second, there is a real need to implement Silverlight for Linux: the same need we have for an OSS Flash replacement. Face it, Silverlight is going to happen at least on Windows, and people are going to start using it, and we're either going to be able to use it too or we're going to be locked out of yet another generation of Web content.

Third, even assuming that SVG+JS was a real replacement for Silverlight, that doesn't mean that Silverlight isn't better. It might not be, I don't know - I haven't looked at its APIs. It could just simply end up being that, like Mono in general, it's a really usable platform that does things in an easier, more efficient, and more manageable fashion than any alternatives.

Fourth, an OSS implementation gives rise for OSS hackers to expand upon the platform in new ways that the proprietary market-driven companies like MS and Novell hadn't thought of. Check out languages like Boo as an example of the kind of new thinking and academic exploration that Mono allowed in ways that MS' .NET Framework or JVMs didn't make nearly as easy. (Of course, it's cool when OSS does it, and evil when Microsoft does it.)

What we need is a Free software alternative...

Posted May 8, 2007 15:36 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Maybe it's possible for people to overturn the craptastic Flash and this less-then-capable Silverlight?

SERIOUSLY. I think I just figured it out!

Screw Flash. It's not cool at all. The only reason I see it anymore is because it's used to replace the even-more-shitty Realplayer, Quicktime, and WMV plugins previously required to view streaming media.

Serously. That's what it is best at. It's not better it's not best. The design and execution and look'n'feel just sucks. It's just better then Realplayer plugins and that is not saying much.

That and it's use in shitty little advertisements.

The only positive thing about it is the animation possibilities.

What we need is a Free software alternative to blow all of this crap away. To be next generation. Silverlight is just a BS attempt by Microsoft at Flash++. I don't think it's going to go anywere.

Next generation stuff.

How about Squeak plugin for browsers?
http://www.squeak.org/

It's ultra portable runtime. Coded in itself.
It uses a well established and very easy to program language.
It's already used in several things.. like OLPC.

It already has dynamic web development framework called Seaside.

It has scriptind/education/math framework called Etoys.

It's absolutely the Flash-killer.

It's designed by people who actually know what they are doing and are dedicated and caring about the state of technology and humanity rather then attempting to lock people into making this or that company rich.

This is the sort of thing that absolutely needs to be promoted by Free and Open Source as a total alternative to the all this proprietory non-standardized, non-caring, very irritating, closed source trash.