Miguel Plans Silverlight on Mono & Linux by Years End 350
El Lobo writes "The Mono open-source project will create a Linux version of Silverlight by the end of year, said Miguel de Icaza, a Novell vice president and head of Mono. Asked about plans for Linux, Microsoft executives have been non-committal, saying that it will depend on demand. But de Icaza, who is attending Mix, was able to commit without hesitating."
ItsATrap! (Score:4, Interesting)
Tag: itsatrap
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LoB
I Want... (Score:2)
I know it's not all that, really. It's just that I need something to create columnar output that replaces Perl, which replaced awk...
this should make at least 2 persons happy (Score:2, Funny)
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So tell me again, we want this to run on *nix, why?
( and i wouldnt call it "extortion" if they really do own the IP rights.. its a licensing payment.. at least call it what it is. )
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IP IS extortion. It's protection money you pay an organization so they won't use the power they have in our corrupt legal system to bring the power of the state to bear on you despite the fact that you have done no harm.
If you define installing an operating system on your computer in the privacy of your home or office as harm, you've either drifted a little too far into the abstract or you need to check your
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While the legal system still acknowledges that the concept of IP is valid, and it holds that they own those rights, then its not extortion to demand payment for its use.. You have a right to treaten *legal* recourse for a violation of your *legal* rights.
Now, if its eventually declared that IP isn
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My only connection with Mono is that I think it's technically the best platform right now and I develop open source software in it. I think it would be a big loss to the open source community if inaccurate FUD like yours destroyed Mono. If people like you succeed at FUDding Mono to death, Microsoft will win because there is nothing else that comes even close competing with Microsoft.
Oh, I earn a living with Ja
we'll see (Score:2, Funny)
It's easy to commit... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we only need a name (Score:5, Interesting)
And I was thinking Silver-light in another language, bonus points if the script is good looking.
For instance, in Arabic it would be fad-da daw' ( ) which looks cool on a large font(thanks to Hisham Bardam for the translation) although it does not roll easily. We might need some shortening.
Miguel.
Re:Now we only need a name (Score:5, Funny)
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Just Some Guy suggests that you call it Zunebrown, conveying both the F/OSS community's likely acceptance of the project, and the likeliness of Microsoft to let it to go without litigation if more than 3 people come to depend on it.
Re:Now we only need a name (Score:5, Funny)
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fa-da-da-da-daw da-daw-da-daw
Re-make Flash as a knock off co-py
fa-da-da-da-daw da-daw-da-daw
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How about just calling it Thirty-pieces-of-silverlight?
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Although my instincts tell me to say "I don't want no stinking Silverlight" (just like everyone here, apparently), youtube has really teached me an important lession: sooner or later, someone will do something that you actually want to access in these platforms, and that's when I'll be really happy you already did this job, so I don't have to wait forever for it to start working.
To summarise: please go fuck yourself, and th
Re:Now we only need a name - SliverLight (Score:2)
LoB
Monochrome (Score:3, Interesting)
Other possibilities:
flash-light
sliver-lux
silver-tux
silvix
sliver
Gold-light
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I've seen all over the Silverlight articles that it seems to make heavy use of IronPython, Microsoft's re-implementation of Python on top of
And on the name (so I don't get a huge OT mod), I would say Moonshine, since silver light shines off the moon (no relation to the homegrown alcohol intended)
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IronPython provides a direct bridge to communicate with
Part of the realization is that web developers use dynamic languages, and they are doing an effort to make sure that there is good support in the platform (in particular Silverlight, a technology targeted to the web develo
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Why don't you anticipate Microsoft moves, and include on your implementation of Silverlight some features that could be achived only with Mono? I'm serious, make it so appealing, so fantastic that sites using YOUR version will be much easier to develop, and much easier to deploy.
Add crazy things, like bindings to SDL, with accelerated 3D graphics where avaliable... so your plugin will be able to run on Linux, MacOSX and
I mean... why play catch-up when you could be ahead of the game?
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We already do that; Although Mono has an incredibly rich ecosystem of libraries that are Unix-specific, Linux-specific or Gnome-specific we usually try to make our libraries cross platform.
This means that we tend to make our code run not only on Mono/Linux but also on
Or www.mono-project.com/Software and www.mono-project.com/Libraries to view the Mono ecosystem of libraries.
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Yes. Because Silverlight does not run on Linux.
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Having a re-implementation means you can't run Silverlight on Linux in the same way that I can't burn you a free copy of Windows.
The end result of all this re-implementing will be that countries that respect the concept of IP will become increasingly less competitive on the world stage than countries that do not until they are eventually marginalized by their
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However, i get the feeling like youre doing the devils work for Microsoft - youre spreading their technology when the market doesnt want it. What youre basically doing is helping the "bait and switch" strategy to work - and they get it for free (by making the community do it for them). Silverlight and the other runtime gizm
Re:Now we only need a name (Score:5, Insightful)
PS We all hate gnome, too. If we wanted the worst of mac combined with the worst of windows we'd just run vista!
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OTOH, I don't really like many aspects of the Gnome project -- mainly their apparent discounting of any users except windows mouth-breather types when making UI decisions (I don't think it's asking too much, just the occasional nod to other audiences, the occasional configuration t
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Slashdot user comes up with innovative new way to show appreciation to Microsoft executives.
Man, I hope you don't get thrown in jail or something. Try and make it seem like an accident ok?
I would rather see... (Score:2)
It can be done!
Re:I would rather see... (Score:5, Funny)
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Id rather see something truly open being supported instead of yet cloning another windows forever mac for a limited time technology into Linux until Microsoft starts suing it into oblivion once they have enough marketshare!
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Mono.. (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Mono.. (Score:5, Funny)
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As my old history teacher used to say... (Score:2)
It is not a mistake that Microsoft's strategy starts with "embrace".
Seriously, Miguel, give up (Score:3, Insightful)
There are plenty of Linux apps out there that could do with your skills and that don't infringe on Microsoft's patents. Why not write a program that'll do something with that number that everyone's been talking about recently. I can't remember what it is, but I'll find it in a moment...
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04 08 15 16 23 42
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This isn't an excuse for what he's doing now, of course...
Re:Seriously, Miguel, give up (Score:4, Informative)
Well, because I believe that Siverlight will become an important component in future applications. The majority of people will probably be happy to spice up their web applications with a little silverlight as it will run on Windows and MacOS.
But if there is no Silverlight for Linux, we will be prevented from getting access to content and applications that will be available.
So we got a couple of strategies dealing with this:
(a) the ostrich strategy also known as the "i-cant-hear-you" strategy: pretend that Silverlight does not exist and hope that by ignoring it, it will go away and vanish.
(b) Hope that nobody adopts it. I seriously doubt that Silverlight will not be adopted, in particular the CLR version shows a lot of promise.
(c) Be proactive and implement it ourselves: we got most of the hard bits of the technology already (a CLR, a JIT, the GC, the core class libraries, even up to some parts of LINQ).
Considering that we are very familiar with the technology, we can do something along the lines of (c). You can feel free to pursue avenues (a) and (b).
In fact, you can ignore Mono completely, nobody is forcing you to use it; Nobody is asking you to contribute to the effort, and nobody is in any position to force you to stop using whatever other technology happens to be your favorite one.
I loved the Silverlight announcement, it is a way of bringing my favorite platform to the web (the CLR and now the DLR) and it seems like a natural fit and extension to what Mono does.
And why exactly would I care about your pet project?
Option D (Score:2)
Seriously, rather than copy them, try being creative for a change and invent something better.
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The problem is that some of us want to have access to content that will be produced with Silverlight, inventing a better system will not make the Silverlight content magically be transformed or accessible to us.
Building a "player" for Silverlight is also orders of magnitude simpler than building the com
Not buying it (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is not unbeatable. They have failed at everything they've tried over the last 5 years, whether it's Vista, IE7 or Zune. Making the stupid assumption that Silverlight is the next greatest thing is why people have lost respect for you.
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Re:Not buying it (Score:5, Informative)
People have created tons of fantastic development platforms, are you kidding me?
I can name a few:
* The whole python universe.
* The Javascript/Ajax revolution in all of its forms and shapes.
* Smalltalk/Squeak
* Java/Swing
* Java/SWT and the Eclipse platform
* Ruby on Rails
* Pylons/Dojo/TurboGears
* Flash
Aa for jumping into Silverlight, the explanation is very simple: it has a high resonance with what we do: it is an incremental upgrade to the Mono platform.
We work on Mono, and on many technologies based on the CLR (both for
Brother, am sorry I have shattered your childhood dreams. You are going to find yourself a new role model to fight the system and stick it to the man [wikipedia.org].
If you think that
From reading this dialog, I get the feeling that fear and hatred have overtaken you. I can appreciate Silverlight and at the same time dislike Windows, I know that this might cause a bit of cognitive dissonance, but my evaluation of technology is not binary. I think Silverlight is a very nice use of the CLR, resonates with our work, and is relatively simple to implement.
My recommendation: "The Art of Possibility" from Benjamin Zander, one of my favorite books. Either that, or going on meds.
Miguel.
Re:Not buying it (Score:4, Insightful)
Any respect I had for you as a software developer is gone. Good luck though, sounds like you will need it.
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Legal options (Score:5, Insightful)
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You are proposing to make Linux a second-class citizen on this future Web. Today, the Internet is created and operated, at least in part, on Linux systems. You are saying that we will be able to use Silverlight application on Linux, but we won't be able to create or serve those applications, and we certainly won't be able
Option E (Score:5, Insightful)
And some of us don't want there to be lots of content produced with Silverlight. It's bad enough that so much of the content on the web is tied up in little obfuscated applets in Java and Flash as it is. Seriously, there's pretty much only three things these are used for: advertising, low-quality DRM, and toys and games. Exceptions like the Java applets at Greg Egan's site are far and few between, and Google has shown us with Maps and Gmail that you don't *need* these plugins to produce rich content.
Thank goodness Microsoft's first try failed, and we don't have ActiveX and its security problems on Mac and Linux.
We don't need a better Silverlight or a better Flash. We need better tools inside the framework that we already have.
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You can't do video-, sound- or advanced graphics-based web apps (by advanced I mean high performance) without flash or java.
That you haven't seen any apps that build on top of the flash or java platform that imp
Re:Option D (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, you mean this? [mono-project.com] GTK+ is a very good toolkit (the best one, as far as I'm concerned). And GTK is available on Mono. I used it, it's good - VERY good, very easy to use. As far as I'm concerned, this is much, much better than Windows.Forms.
Look around you. There are tons of high-quality non-MS open source projects that run on Mono. You seem to be thinking that copying the Microsoft runtime library is all that Mono does. That's far from the truth.
C# is a good language. I don't care whether MS made it or the Martians - it's good, there is an open source implementation, there are open source libraries, so I will use it.
Re:Option D::IANAL (Score:2)
From what I know of patent law (not that much), I feel that it's best to not use techniques that have been used by a coercive monopoly. As a result, I prefer to NOT use CLI, mono, etc. I may, possibly, be overly cautious, but I have no way of knowing. If you do, you apear to be under a NDA.
It's all very well to say "if I never share my code with anyone, then I'm safe". It's probabl
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Re:Seriously, Miguel, give up (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you left out:
(d) come up with something better that can be made cross-platform from the get-go that gives people a compelling reason to use it instead of Silverlight, rather than permanently following along a few steps behind Microsoft.
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Like ActiveX, you mean?
ActiveX might have been successful if fools like you had been around to implement it on Linux.
Re:Seriously, Miguel, give up (Score:5, Insightful)
Making poor imitations of crappy ideas isn't clear indication of talent; quite the opposite, in fact.
You forgot "want" before "believe", and we all know the result of introducing yet another nonstandard web extension is. I mean, it's worked so well for Microsoft in the past: proprietary JavaScript extensions, HTML extensions, ActiveX. It's just brought the web together into a nice, unified platform, so you never have to worry about how every different browser handles your website. Oh wait, no it hasn't: just the opposite.
How about: d) Proactively discourage its use; build, distribute, and support and alternative framework that is not under the control of a corporation known for breaking compatibility regularly to discourage competition. Get this into Firefox and build an IE plugin to support it.
I think you just asked the question that so many others are asking about Mono.
Not quite true (Score:2)
Well, that's patently false (pun intended.)
I've never liked Gnome, so I'm less affected than others who do use it. Even I, however, have a hard time avoiding GTK applications unless I want to, for instance, recode OpenOffice.org for personal use.
As a result, when Microsoft's lawyers send a "cease and desist" order against non-Novell users of the Gnome/GTK software that's been infected with
Silverlight is a new spin on ActiveX (Score:4, Insightful)
We know you love the CLR... unfortunately, it's not an open system like the UNIX programming environment and so it's not really well liked in the open source world. We're not happy with the limitations of the Windows programming environment, and we find the large and complex APIs beloved of the Windows developers a throwback to the old pre-UNIX mainframe era, so we expect Silverlight to be the same kind of Windows wart on the side of UNIX. If we're mistaken, if Mono can be integrated well into the UNIX world, we'd love to see you prove us wrong by doing it.
But you don't seem to like the UNIX environment, so I guess you won't be doing anything along those lines...
Well, because I believe that Siverlight will become an important component in future applications. The majority of people will probably be happy to spice up their web applications with a little silverlight as it will run on Windows and MacOS.
ActiveX has failed to make Dot-NET take off in the web application world. Why do you think that Silverlight will do any better?
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I'd like to remind everyone that just a few years ago, Miguel was saying the same thing about XAML. [tirania.org] "XAML/Avalon applications will be written, and people will consume them. The worst bit: people will expect their desktop to be able to access these "rich
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a) improve the svg situation now that Adobe has dropped the ball, on windows, after all silverlight is mainly a flash clone with
b) try to give a helping hand to one of the projects why try to implement a really opensource flash tech or
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I'm trying to figure out whether it reminds me of (a) a not very good attempt by someone in PR or a shill to present themselves as a member of the community, (b) a slightly-too-subtle parody of an obvious attempt at PR/shilling or (c) sarcasm that's (again) just a little too subtle to be recognised for what it is.
Or it could be genuine. Who knows?
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Where do you draw the line? (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple of decades ago that would have read "I am somewhat sad to see that many of our fellow developers have chosen to re-implement UNIX, rather than recognizing the place that Wind
That's nice, Miguel (Score:4, Insightful)
Call us again in a few years when the patents (whichever they are) have expired. Say, about 2026.
Re:That's nice, Miguel (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, with Mono they at least tried to pretend like they understood the patent situation surrounding the technology. But with this Silverlight stuff just being announced, there is no way you could have done any type of audit to know what you are getting yourself into!
Silverfish should have been a clue. (Score:2, Funny)
When MS designed this thing they could have used mono as a base. That way they would have had an open source, cross platform base from the start. They could have distributed your (and your contributors) work with windows update and gotten mono on every windows desktop.
They didn't. They instead chose to pull the rug out from under you by open sourcing their own CLR (to some extent) and making it cross platform (to some extent).
They shit on you. Please don't just sit there with a grin on your face
Re:Silverfish should have been a clue. (Score:4, Informative)
They did not open source their CLR, you are confused.
They open sourced a chunk of code that we do not have, the DLR and as I said on my blog post, we will be shipping the DLR together with IronPython and NRuby (when it becomes
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To do otherwise suggests you are complicit in MS scheming. Do you understand why so many people are angry with what you do ?
Miguel, let's be honest ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, can you admit that the only reason MS even tolerates your product, is just in case somebody brings up how they have no solutions in Linux they can just casually just sa
Thats great! (Score:2)
ffs (Score:2, Insightful)
firstly i wish to say "thank you" to the mono team! yee are doing a great job!
secondly what the f*** is wrong with you
while yee are arguing which distro has the longest
Re:ffs (Score:5, Insightful)
Silverlight is not just a reimplementation of Flash. Coding in
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Re:ffs (Score:4, Insightful)
See this is classic 'geek' delusion. It assumes that just because something a technology is easy to program with that's its going to take over the world. Lets look at the facts:
- From the perspective of content creators, Adobe is the most loved (Photoshop/Flash/Dreamweaver) and Microsoft is the most hated (FrontPage/IE).
- Flash is on 97% of machines (500 million+ users), Silverlight is on 0% (5+ users) of machines.
- Flash requires nothing to install or download, Silverlight requires a 4MB+ download and install. It still remains to be seen whether non-admin users have access to install IE/Firefox plugins under Vista.
- A large percentage of content creators use Macs which Visual Studio/.Net is not available for.
- Flash programmers are cheaper to hire than
.Net ones.
- Flash is proven on existing web sites (YouTube), Silverlight is unproven.
- Flash is on version 9, Silverlight is on version 1. That's a lot of bugs/features that have already been addressed.
- Flash is based on Javascript which is more common amongst web developers than C#.
So as you can see MS is once again creating new, proprietary technologies that the world doesn't need.Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
BS. Most websites today work fine with Firefox and Linux, despite Microsoft attempts at locking like ActiveX. Most companies now realises the benefits of platform independence (I've heard things are different in South Korea for instance).
But now you say that this just announced platform will start to break standards and compatibility (surprise!), and you say "WE MUST JUMP ON THIS BANDWAGO
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It's only a useful piece of technology if you want to abandon the UNIX programming environment and switch to one that's based on the Windows API and isolates you from all the rest of the UNIX tools you're used to.
Just because something is free, that doesn't mean it's worth less than you paid for it. Microsoft apologists have been pointing this out for years, as if it was somehow new
Re:ffs (Score:5, Informative)
When was the last time that you used the "UNIX programming environment" in your web browser? Last I checked, you had to write in a subset that isoaltes you from the operating system and only allowed DOM access and Javascript.
Flash, the other major tool for RIAs, does not give you access to *any* Unix facilities.
You seem to be confused as to what Silverlight is.
One of the nice things about Silverlight (as I pointed out in a blog entry a few weeks ago) is that you can actually generate Silverlight content with any Unix tool you want.
You can easily generate it with PHP:
header ("Content-Type: application/xaml");
print "
";
Or you can generate it with shell, perl, python or assembly language.
The server side is probably as Unixy as anything else can get.
Open? Don't make me laugh. (Score:2)
some people are sickened that it comes under an open license
MS has licensed bits and pieces of it under licenses that are *supposedly* open. That's an easily-abused word.
.Net without *any* potential legal threats.
Wake me up when they open things enough such that it's possible to create truly portable and open versions of
and are afraid that linux will become that bit more irrelevant on the desktop side of things
Well, you're right. We're afraid that MS's pseudo-"open", but in truth proprietary languages/framework- just "open" enough to implement some of the core features but not enough to guarantee support for most applications, playing a permanent one-
*sigh* (Score:3, Insightful)
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Get A Grip (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dot NET, on the other hand, is built on an OS specific design that's got a huge semantic ga
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Well, I'm a Java programmer by trade and have used a few others and I don't have any idea what you mean.
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Java is another little platform-in-its-own-world that is generally isolated from the rest of the operating system it runs on (albeit not to as great an extent as Mono), so it's not surprising that...
_.. I don't have any idea what you mean.
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
One for the negative nancies (Score:5, Informative)
* Fiducial (http://fiducial.biz): Their new site uses Mono and ASP.NET.
* Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org): WikiPedia uses Mono for its search facilities. The indexing and the actual searching is done by Mono-based applications.
* GovTrack.Us (http://www.govtrack.us/)
* GotMono.Net (http://www.gotmono.net)
* Yakugo.com (http://www.yakugo.com) is an AJAX-based English-Japanese dictionary site that uses Mono.
* [1] (http://www.saileventschedule.de) A web-based schedule for sailing events like racing and training.
More can be found at:
http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono#
Windows Media all over again (Score:4, Insightful)
Lately you can watch snippets of videos on MSNBC because they are "beta testing" FLASH to show their videos ONLY because of the success of YouTube. You still cannot watch live events on macs though.
The point of all this is that Microsoft is not making Silverlight because they care about the community. They are making it so that they can stranglehold all of the non windows users at some point down the road Once we all get sucked in and a bunch of sites are made using Slverlight.. Microsoft will then come out with a new feature that will ONLY work on Windows.. and then we will all be sorry again.
I am a web developer who has to make 4 different versions of each site because of all the "bugs" in IE.
I would be an idiot to build a site using Silverlight.. because we all know exactly what's going to happen with that format down the road.
You'll need a ten foot pole... (Score:5, Insightful)
But they aren't. And I don't know if I trust someone who is both indeminified against lawsuits from Microsoft and (as he blogs) gets drunk with senior Microsoft employees. The timing is bad, to say the least, who wants to use crippleware and anything smelling of MS/Novell?
Other people have said but I will add: There is nothing earthshaking about Miguel's desire to extend Mono, his copy of
I believe his arguments are disingenuous. (Well, fake.) MS is NOT able to easily push new technologies into acceptance. They can spend a lot of money on advertising. The video of siverlight movie editing was cute but huh? It was using a faked Minority Report video, and an attempt to make a Minority Report interface (not as good as Kai's Power Tools about 10 years before this), and a laugh at anyone who really does video editing. This new Novell project is premature, serves to support MS embrace and extend, paints a nice target for threats and guess what if you build a successful company on it MS will own your ass.
Whatever silverlight promises may be nice to have, and some snippets I saw in his blog about Ruby and 3D sounded enticing. But you know what? You don't need anything Microsoft to do cool things. Maybe this will be impetus for open source people who don't work at Novell and carouse with the MS senior execs to get moving on developing something more interesting. I'd rather not intentionally put manacles on my own arms and wait for the other shoe to drop, which is what it seems is required for using Miguel's software. Head in the sand indeed, let's wait until the world depends on silverlight I've got plenty of other things to do. Someone tell me why you want to help son of SCO? Getting drunk with the execs indeed! Fuck off!
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You don't need to switch to Linux to test and develop Lunix-compatible code Windows *already*.
You have a choice of at least three UNIX-compatible APIs for Windows, one is even provided by Microsoft. There's at least two cross-platform GUI toolkits you can use. And you avoid the
Or you can use Java.
All Mono or Silverlight give you is an API that doesn't work well on UNIX, so you can create applications that don't
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You might want to look at our release announcements (they come out about every six weeks) as we have been making a lot of progress on Windows.Forms, we have a team of six developers working on it and they commit on a daily basis.
Miguel.
Re:Wake up (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes there is, the Java platform, which has a larger number of users, developers, and platforms it has been ported to.
We know. Microsofts roof. I don't want to be there.
eliminates entire classes of "glue" and "can't get there from here" problems.
I notice you don't give any concrete examples to refute... Is it possible that some of these "can't get there from here" problems you mention exist on other platforms because they were designed with more security in mind, or to be more platform independent for instance?
You've all seen the demos of movies projected onto flying 3D surfaces etcetera
Pfft. Like that is new. Come back when it works both for Linux, Solaris, Mac, or Windows, OpenGL accelerated [java.net].
With
Just like the Java platform then, only 5 years late and Windows only.
Christ, that sounds like a commercial.
Yes, you do sound very much like a commercial.