Miguel Plans Silverlight on Mono & Linux by Years End

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!

The way I see it, only Novell has a license to be releasing a Mono/Silverlight plugin with Linux. Anyone else who jumps on the bandwagon might get a nasty call from Microsoft Legal demanding that they pay up the $650 extortion fee. Or has Miguel conveniently forgotten that the XAML/WPF framework is Microsoft's proprietary technology? (For which I'm sure they have many patents and trademarks.)

Tag: itsatrap

we'll see

it's a trap.

It's easy to commit...

when you don't have any customers depending on it.

ha!

TFA:

The code for the Dynamic Language Runtime, which allows dynamic language programmers to create .Net applications

well, THAT'S one example for redundancy. *scnr*

Steve will have words with Ron first

And Ron (Novells ceo) will do the right thing and cancel it

Now we only need a name

Sebastien Pouliot suggested we call it "Moonlight" (anagram on Mono).

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

You know Miguel, I was thinking the same thing. Software names on linux are not obscure enough. Picking a name that can't even be written in latin characters would be the pinnacle of l337ness. Faddadaw' will conquer the market for sure.

Re:Now we only need a name

How about keeping the "mono" in there. You could call it "Monopolight" maybe.

Re:Now we only need a name

Linux is, and should be, so much more than a poor man's clone of either of these systems. The people who use Linux do so because they like it, not because it's free. If it were just about price any of us could have a "free" copy of windows too.

...
PS We all hate gnome, too. If we wanted the worst of mac combined with the worst of windows we'd just run vista!

Thing is, we don't all hate GNOME. GNOME has some very innovative features, such as Beagle and the new GNOME File Chooser dialog, which make it ideal for some kinds of users. I personally prefer KDE for its superior customizability, but GNOME is by no means worthless. In the same way, I think that Mono has some very innovative features that are unique to it: Mono.Addins [mono-project.com] comes quickly to mind. Even outside of Mono, the Nemerle language [nemerle.org] is another great open-source addition to the .NET framework. The Gtk# engine is one of the most easy to use and powerful GUI frameworks yet made, and is only possible due to Mono. In short, please don't claim to represent all of Linux userdom when you spout off your hatred of GNOME and Mono. You don't.

I would rather see...

Someone at Apache, IBM, or Sun announce that they are going to introduce a truely cross platform, open source, and Free alternative to Silverlight and Flash.

It can be done!

Re:I would rather see...

There is a cross platform alternative for flash in nearly every web browser - the BLINK tag can be almost as annoying as flash if used correctly.

Mono..

"mono" Great name. Nothing like naming a project after a virus known for disabling whole cheerleading squads in a single bound.

Re:Mono..

If as a geek (other than a medical doctor) that's the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word "mono", then you need to seek some counseling.

If the first thing that comes mind for you when someone mentions "mono" is some obscure open source implementation of the .NET CLR, then you need to seek some counselling.

As my old history teacher used to say...

"The embrace of Prussia is deadly". It was a reminder that for a long time Prussia was mostly victorious, even against former allies.

It is not a mistake that Microsoft's strategy starts with "embrace".

Seriously, Miguel, give up

You've clearly got a lot of talent, so why are you wasting your time making Open Source versions of all of Microsoft's products? All you're effectively doing is giving Microsoft the foothold in Linux that they need.

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...

Re:Seriously, Miguel, give up

You've clearly got a lot of talent, so why are you wasting your time making Open Source versions of all of Microsoft's products? All you're effectively doing is giving Microsoft the foothold in Linux that they need.

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.

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...

And why exactly would I care about your pet project?

Not buying it

The problem with your argument is that no one has even tried to make something better. You jump on the Microsoft bandwagon every single time. I miss the Miguel from the Gnome project. This new Miguel is just a Microsoft sellout. Silverlight hasnt even begun to take root, not by a long shot, and yet here you are already working hard to make sure it does.

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.

Re:Not buying it

The problem with your argument is that no one has even tried to make something better. You jump on the Microsoft bandwagon every single time.

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 .NET and Mono-unique), and this seems like a natural next step.

I miss the Miguel from the Gnome project. This new Miguel is just a Microsoft sellout.

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].

Silverlight hasnt even begun to take root, not by a long shot, and yet here you are already working hard to make sure it does.

If you think that /us/ supporting Silverlight is really what will tilt the balance in the Flash/Silverlight/Ajax universe you are giving us way more credit than we deserve. You might want to revisit your assumptions.

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.

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

Ah yes. The "get on meds" retort. That's usually where people go when they lose the argument. You've obviously spent too much time on usenet. By all means though, I'm an easy target, just a nameless person on slashdot. It doesn't change what you're doing.

Any respect I had for you as a software developer is gone. Good luck though, sounds like you will need it.

Legal options

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.

Well, guess what: US law gives a 20-year monopoly on access to that content to Microsoft. If you want access to that content, get a Microsoft system and have at it.

Option E

The problem is that some of us want to have access to content that will be produced with Silverlight

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.

Re:Option D

"Seriously, rather than copy them, try being creative for a change and invent something better."
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:Seriously, Miguel, give up

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).

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.

Re:Seriously, Miguel, give up

You've clearly got a lot of talent [...]

Making poor imitations of crappy ideas isn't clear indication of talent; quite the opposite, in fact.

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.

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.

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:

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.

In fact, you can ignore Mono completely, nobody is forcing you to use it [...] 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?

I think you just asked the question that so many others are asking about Mono.

Silverlight is a new spin on ActiveX

I loved the Silverlight announcement, it is a way of bringing my favorite platform to the web (the CLR and now the DLR)

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?

That's nice, Miguel

However, since I don't have your "special friend" relationship with Steve Ballmer and he has a much larger budget for lawyers, I'll pass.

Call us again in a few years when the patents (whichever they are) have expired. Say, about 2026.

Re:That's nice, Miguel

That's pretty much just what I thought when I heard the "Icaza, was able to commit without hesitating" thing.

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!

What a waste of time...

What a complete waste of time this would be. Mono is already feature incomplete as it is and now he wants to take on another project. How about finishing the one you currently have then taking on more projects.

Silverfish should have been a clue.

Dear Miguel.

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 and take it. You are much too bright and hard working and don't deserve this kind of treatment.

Re:Silverfish should have been a clue.

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 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

Thats great!

Finally Linux being embraced . Microsoft is going to let us have our cake and eat it too! Then maybe they'll even provide thier own extended version after the Mono version is stable. Then we can scurry about trying to fix everything before we are extinguished

ffs

i dont care if loose karma for this

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 ./'s ?! get a grip!

while yee are arguing which distro has the longest .... microsoft came a long and actually made a really usefull piece of technology that ties alot of features together in one package, not only that but some people are sickened that it comes under an open license and are afraid that linux will become that bit more irrelevant on the desktop side of things

keep reaching fot that rainbow! keep playing catchup to microsoft

end rant.

Re:ffs

Agreed. The vitriolic tone of this thread is somewhat astonishing to me. I'm primarily a Windows/.NET developer that is slowly working towards migrating to a Linux platform, and the Mono project is one of the key technologies leading me in that direction. When Microsoft announced that Silverlight was going to be a cross-platform technology that only ran on Windows and Apple, I was extremely frustrated. I can understand why, strategically, Microsoft has chosen not to implement a Silverlight implementation on Linux, but I cannot understand why the majority of those commenting on this thread are arguing so vehemently against Miguel.

Silverlight is not just a reimplementation of Flash. Coding in .NET is a pleasure, and a can gaurantee you that coding for the Silverlight platform is going to be infinitely more organized and structured than coding for Flash. Website developers are going to flock to this new technology. Without a Linux implementation of Silverlight, 20% of websites will be completely inaccessible to Linux users in 5 years.

Re:ffs

Silverlight is not just a reimplementation of Flash. Coding in .NET is a pleasure, and a can gaurantee you that coding for the Silverlight platform is going to be infinitely more organized and structured than coding for Flash. Website developers are going to flock to this new technology. Without a Linux implementation of Silverlight, 20% of websites will be completely inaccessible to Linux users in 5 years.

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:ffs

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.

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.

*sigh*

What does this format bring to Linux, other than a patent minefield that renders it useless to all but Novell (and then only until MS extinguishes them)?

Get A Grip

Slamming Mono [wikipedia.org] for implementing Silverlight is about as irrational as slamming Opera or Mozilla for implementing JavaScript.

what's with this guy?

Used to love Miguel and I know him and Nat do a lot of incredible stuff. But this Mono stuff has always completely baffled me. Ever since the very beginning over 5 years ago. Has always seemed like terrible idea to me. Just don't understand his obsession with MS. Can someone tell me what good has come out of Mono? I would like to know (I not denying there is good, I'm genuiously interested in being informed).

One for the negative nancies

Web Projects Using Mono

        * 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: