Silverlight for Linux hits with Microsoft punch (The Register)

[Posted February 12, 2009 by cook]

The Register discusses the release of Moonlight for Linux. "An open-source version of Silverlight has been released with Microsoft's support, as Flash rival Adobe began crowing about the new media player's death. Moonlight 1.0 from the Novell-backed Mono team was posted Wednesday, having passed all of Microsoft's regression tests. Moonlight plugs into Firefox and is available for all major Linux distributions including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. Moonlight builds on Silverlight 1.0, coming with a graphics pipeline, video and audio frameworks, and a JavaScript bridge that use the browser's JavaScript engine to execute."

How free is it?

Posted Feb 12, 2009 16:26 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] (2 responses)

Are we going to see Silverlight in popular distros, or will it sit next to mp3 players in additional repositories for those who are not bound by the US software patents?

How free is it?

Posted Feb 12, 2009 16:55 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Probably the second.

Microsoft licensed codecs to the silverlight folks so that it's legal to redistribute them with the media support, but I expect it has restrictions on redistribution and are closed source codecs.

So for some distros can ship if it they want, but things like Fedora and Debian are probably never going to ship it or stick it on 'main' distributions. I think it can use ffmpeg stuff to work in the absence, but those probably still have patent issues.

How free is it?

Posted Feb 12, 2009 17:43 UTC (Thu) by nsoranzo (guest, #34668) [Link]

Regarding Fedora, see:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems#Moonlight

Silverlight for Linux hits with Microsoft punch (The Register)

Posted Feb 12, 2009 17:35 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

If you wanted to find out whether Adobe Air was more successful than Moonlight, they'd surely find few less-likely-to-be-accurate sources than Adobe's CFO, who if he's any good at his job is going to be paying more attention to whether what he says improves the stock price than on, say, finding out the unbiased truth.

I'd expect him to say what he said even if Moonlight was ubiquitous and Air hadn't even been released yet: as it is, the usage of both is low enough that I doubt you can get any useful data.

(Why would anyone ever ask a CFO for accurate info other than that related to a company's financials anyway? Actually, given the various economy-wide scandals of the last year or two, I'm tempted to ask why one would ever ask a CFO for accurate information on anything, but that's probably overgeneralizing from a few really, really bad eggs. It's not as if Adobe is a bank or something untrustworthy like that. :) )

WOW! I'm so excited!

Posted Feb 12, 2009 19:49 UTC (Thu) by drobert_bfm (guest, #56623) [Link] (3 responses)

Frankly, this is a non-story, just like Mono has been pretty much since the beginning. De Icaza is
being financed to allow M$ to claim buy-in from the open source and Linux community, and really
nothing else.

WOW! I'm so excited!

Posted Feb 12, 2009 20:15 UTC (Thu) by asamardzic (guest, #27161) [Link] (1 responses)

I mostly agree, but: if this Silverlight thing is compelling enough so that these morons writing bank account management, and alike Web applications, switch to using it (these get written, in my part of the world, strictly as some combination of ASP, ActiveX, and alike crap, and thus to use them, one has to somehow have IE running), and then if this Moonlight thing is compatible enough so that it could make it possible to run these from any browser under Linux - then I guess I'm fully supporting it.

WOW! I'm so excited!

Posted Feb 15, 2009 16:16 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

As spiro says below, it will work for the first few iterations (and thus be marketed as "better than Flash"), then mysteriously stop working and require Windows 8.5.

Sigh. Why not stick to DHTML? It works well enough for most applications, and as to the rest I don't want them running on my machine. It's not as if JavaScript is difficult or anything.

WOW! I'm so excited!

Posted Feb 13, 2009 0:45 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

The problem is that websites are actually putting out Silverlight content
now, so we can't just ignore it. (I think NetFlix is probably the most
prominent example.)

And since it's open-source, there are plenty of content-creators who think
it's fine -- and better than Flash -- on the basis of copyright, without
considering patents or Microsoft trustworthiness.

Silverlight for Linux hits with Microsoft punch (The Register)

Posted Feb 12, 2009 20:35 UTC (Thu) by spiro (guest, #54657) [Link]

I can see the Linux masses will love the idea of Microsoft software on their machines. I predict that MS will release something functional for non-windows platforms, then they'll market it to death as truly cross platform. Then when the planet is using it for everything important, Microsoft will add proprietary features that require the Windows version to run.

Hasn't the world been bitten by variations of their "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" philosophy enough times that we aren't at least a *little* weary? Sorry "wary".. Freudian slip.

Silverlight for Linux hits with Microsoft punch (The Register)

Posted Feb 13, 2009 0:39 UTC (Fri) by mikov (guest, #33179) [Link]

Sigh. Doesn't work in Debian Etch :-) May be next time ...