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Miguel Plans Silverlight on Mono & Linux by Years End
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu May 03, 2007 05:41 PM
from the how-does-miguel-get-to-be-a-vp dept.
from the how-does-miguel-get-to-be-a-vp dept.
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."
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ItsATrap! (Score:4, Interesting)
Tag: itsatrap
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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Re:Now we only need a name (Score:5, Funny)
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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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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!
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Get A Grip (Score:5, Insightful)
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#
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!
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?
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Legal options (Score:5, Insightful)
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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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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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Re:I would rather see... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Mono.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:ffs (Score:5, Insightful)
Silverlight is not just a reimplementation of Flash. Coding in
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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.
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