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!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Now we only need a name

[miguel]

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:we'll see

[aichpvee]

I can't believe it took that fool this long to announce that he was going to copy microsoft's crap again. Can't someone please lock this idiot up before he completely turns Linux into a broken, poor-man's windows.

I don't know how he got so influential in the first place, but all he seems to do is copy the worst ideas from windows. That is, when he's not copying the worst ideas from mac.

Monochrome

[goombah99]

How about "monochrome" instead of silverlight. (ie. whitelight versus single frequency). Of course those opposed to it might call it silverblight.

Other possibilities:

flash-light
sliver-lux
silver-tux
silvix
sliver
Gold-light

Where do you draw the line?

[argent]

I am somewhat sad to see that many of our fellow Slashdotters have chosen the head-in-sand option, rather than recognizing the place that .NET and Silverlight will most likely play in the IT infrastructure of tomorrow. Whether I may like it or not, Microsoft is a major player, and can push new frameworks into prominence easily.

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 Windows and NT will most likely play in the IT infrastructure of tomorrow. Whether I may like it or not, Microsoft is a major player, and can push new frameworks into prominence easily." Following that advice would have kept Linux and BSD from catching on and made the replacement of UNIX by Windows a reality rather than a threat.

Re:Now we only need a name

[vhogemann]

Now...

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 ... WinXP!

I mean... why play catch-up when you could be ahead of the game?

Re:Seriously, Miguel, give up

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Miguel says...

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.

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" sites," he said. If the Linux community didn't build a XAML runtime, we'd be left out in the cold, he said.

Now it's three years later. Where are all of the XAML applications? Where are the thousands of web applications I can't access without a XAML runtime? Miguel has attempted to lead us down this road before.

AJAX stopped XAML dead in its tracks, at a time when new Microsoft technologies were still considered unstoppable. Why should we believe that Silverlight will be any different?

I'd also like to remind everyone that even though Silverlight is intended to be a Flash Killer, none of the partnerships Microsoft has announced so far are "wins" from content providers previously committed to Flash. They're all content providers who were already using Windows Media and are simply going to take advantage of a better way of packaging it.

Finally, there is the issue of software patents. Novell has sold its soul and doesn't have to worry, but what about the rest of us?

Re:Option E

[miguel]

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.

And you honestly believe that Mono implementing Silverlight will actually make a difference as to whether Silverlight succeeds or fails?

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.

You are preaching to the choir:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Apr-20.html [tirania.org]

Miguel

Re:Option E

[jsebrech]

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.

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 impress you is mostly because these are commercial applications. My company sells a flash-based AutoCAD floorplan viewer / editor. Fauxto.com is a nice example of what's possible, but you can do better still than that.

I've always thought google maps demonstrated exactly why you did in fact need flash and java. It is the pinnacle of javascript-based tech, and yet it is a lot less usable than the new yahoo maps and the older java-based map systems.