Mono Abandons Open Source Silverlight 336
mikejuk writes "The Mono project is about the only group of people actively talking up .NET and developing it, but in an interview Miguel de Icaza has admitted that Moonlight, the Mono version of Silverlight, isn't worth the effort any more. He said, 'Silverlight has not gained much adoption on the web, so it did not become the must-have technology that I thought [it] would have to become. And Microsoft added artificial restrictions to Silverlight that made it useless for desktop programming. These days we no longer believe that Silverlight is a suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology, there are just too many limitations for it to be useful.'"
Netflix (Score:5, Informative)
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How do they handle Android - do they use a completely different technology or do they implement silverlight in their Android app?
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What they don't use: silverlight. I don't know what they do, but it's explicitly not that.
I can only wonder how much money was under the table from MS to get netflix to do this, in the face of common sense.
Re:Netflix (Score:5, Informative)
Netflix on Android and iOS use raw video streams. No DRM or other funny business.
DRM vs. locked bootloaders (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why the Nook Tablet came with a locked bootloader, whereas the original Nook Color spawned a large ROM'mer community. Netflix required it in order to let them use their app. I think I'd rather deal with DRM for paid downloads than have my whole device locked down.
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Along the same lines, I've noticed that Netflix is available pre-installed and pre-validated only* on Android platforms that aren't root-available out-of-the-box. My recollection is that it takes some hacking around if your phone isn't one of the ones Netflix already trusts. Too bad for them they can't tell I rooted my Motorola Droid 4 after they foolishly trusted it. MwahahahaHAHAH!
*I haven't made a point of comparing Netflix implementations in the Android universe, so I may be just talking out of my ass**
Re:DRM vs. locked bootloaders (Score:5, Informative)
If you want Netflix HD you need a locked down Android. Netflix (with standard def) is available for all Androids - locked or not. It's why the Nook tablet's netflix video is better than the Kindle Fire's - the Fire's drawing from the SD low res stream, the Nook from the HD stream.
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I think I'd rather deal with DRM for paid downloads than have my whole device locked down.
This problem will be largely solved by the proliferation of cheap yet higher quality Android tablets entering the marketplace in greater numbers. The coming commoditization of the tablet will drive down prices and splinter the user base. This will have two major effects. First, it will make standards based technologies essential to apps or services designed to be accessed via these cheap iPad clones running Android. Second, it will make DRM and lockdown meaningless and counter productive because people will
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That's not insightful. Netflix uses DRM on all platforms. It's a requirement of the media companies.
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Re:Netflix (Score:5, Insightful)
Netflix isn't getting paid off by MS for this. There are two interesting aspects to the Netflix-on-Linux problem, one obvious, one not.
Obvious problem: Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix is on the board of directors of Microsoft. This, almost definitely, gives him sips of kool-aid and some self-interest in growing Microsoft's market share for its pet projects.
Non-obvious problem: The studios that actually own all the distribution rights to the videos on Netflix are, for the most part, wary about DRM on Linux, under the belief that obscurity grants security. Now, we all know that's stupid, but we also all know they are stupid.
From what I understand, the actual minds at Netflix wanted a Linux product, know how to make it happen (to the point where they have internally tested it and it works) and would release it if it were feasible but the studios are hogtying them with contracts.
Re:Netflix (Score:5, Informative)
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Netflix moves a huge amount of video on the web, so I doubt it's that unpopular. Most people seem to be accessing it on their TVs, XBoxes and Roku style set top boxes though.
Netflix FWIK is limited to the US market. /me checking... :
Sorry, Netflix is not available in your country... yet
(I'm in EU)
It is available in Canada as well.
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I didn't say the contracts with Netflix were reasonable, just that the reported reason Netflix doesn't support Linux is that their contracts either require the MS DRM or DRM in general and that the studios are unhappy with what options Netflix have provided. Of course, this would all be solved if MS just put out a general C# DRM library instead of some weird Windows-only one. I guess I've just never been desperate enough to try to reverse engineer it.
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Of course, this would all be solved if MS just put out a general C# DRM library instead of some weird Windows-only one. I guess I've just never been desperate enough to try to reverse engineer it.
Generally speaking, effective DRM is more difficult to engineer than you make it sound. The systems that have been effective have been tied deep into the OS level (say, the Windows video drivers), so porting them to another platform would be difficult. I'm not saying you can't crack Windows DRM schemes -- people obviously have -- but cracking them isn't the same thing as porting them.
I recall that Sun Microsystems was working on some kind of open source DRM platform that sounded pretty promising, I think it
Re:Netflix (Score:5, Informative)
It is, of course, impossible that Netflix might have chosen Silverlight because of technical reasons, such as the effectiveness and seamless nature of its bitrate scaling support... If memory serves, the browser-based alternatives to Silverlight for this functionality at the time they switched didn't work as well.
No, it's obviously a conspiracy. Microsoft isn't capable of developing an effective platform for anything.
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Apple's HTTP live streaming solution does have pretty widespread support, but it was only released in 2009. Netflix switched to Silverlight (or at least was doing public beta testing) in late 2008. It's important to keep in mind that Netflix's decision would have been based on available solutions in 2007 or 2008, not in 2012.
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Except, of course, the whole contract problem you are willfully ignoring...
And obviously I meant a general-purpose Linux OS rather than Android or BoxeeBox since every Netflix subscriber who has wanted a Linux product has seen all the "it works on Android/BoxeeBox so it should work on Linux" posts around the net.
Yes and No (Score:5, Informative)
Silverlight (and XNA, and Windows Phone 7, etc) basically refer to overlapping collections of .NET libraries (often referred to as profiles) which different environments support. The set of libraries that Xamarin provides for Android development is a superset of the libraries available in Silverlight 4. However the intent isn't for you to write Silverlight applications that happen to run on Android. The idea is to write all your common code using the .NET Base Class Libraries (BCL; which are included in the ECMA standard), and then write your interface using (wrappers) around the native libraries for Android (or iOS or WP7 or Silverlight or WPF or ASP), for each platform you release on.
Why not? (Score:3)
Games can be written 99% in OpenGL ES, and just the user controls will vary from platform to platform.
The part that needs to be rewritten are GUI panels, widgets, layout, etc. Since all these platforms have significantly different interaction models (not just appearance) then any attempt to use the same interface will result in very poor user experience. Furthermore, if you really do have an application that is just GUI forms, then it must not be a very complex, and shouldn't take long to redo.
Re:Netflix (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't have to implement Silverlight, just the audio/video codecs and one of several possible transports. Silverlight builds on the pre-existing Microsoft Media infrastructure. For example, in many cases I can transcode a Silverlight audio stream by connecting to the legacy RTSP transport and decoding the Windows Media Audio packets. Neither FFmpeg nor GStreamer can do this, because while they have good codec support they have shit transport support.
I've build a custom HTTP/RTSP library and ASF decoder, and then heavily refactored the WMA decoder from FFmpeg. In fact, I've written a daemon which can transcode Windows Media Audio and Flash FLV/FLA audio (plus the easy ones, like Shoutcast and vanilla RTSP), and transcode in real-time for whatever the connecting device requires (various HTTP streaming formats, RTSP, etc; and from, e.g. WMA to Vorbis).
The daemon is both event oriented and multi-process. I can transcode (with resampling) 4 live broadcasts and reflect to 50+ clients while using a fraction of the CPU a browser takes just to playback one stream. Again, FFmpeg, GStreamer, and VLC have all the wrong optimizations for this kind of scaling. Internet media streaming is still in the dark ages.
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Re:Netflix (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah. OSX, too. HA! A joke. MS spend years and many tens of millions to derail the corpulent and putrid hulk that is Adobe Flash. Instead, they manage to build a custom DRM container for NetFlix, as the sole volume partner/customer.
Anybody else who tried walking out on this limb, wound up getting screwed, per the usual MS bait-and-wait.
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It would make running XBMC on GNU/Linux even better for those in the areas Netflix covers too :)
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Exactly. If it weren't for Netflix, I wouldn't even know what Silverlight is. It doesn't even run reliably on Windows VMs under VirtualBox.
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I'm using a VirtualBox VM for Netflix streaming and it actually works pretty well for me. Haven't had to boot into windows for a few months now. The only issue I had was some audio lag which turned out to be caused by PulseAudio.
What problems have you run into?
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Is that a rhetorical question? I'm not quite sure. I'll play along and assume it's not.
The answer is: DRM. The reason various set-top boxes and iOS and Android devices can do Netflix without Silverlight is because those platforms are locked down enough that they don't need Silverlight's DRM to discourage copying.
Sure, they could make their own dedicated "app" for Windows, and implement DRM in there. I bet under Windows 8, they will.
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I've got mixed feelings about this. It's been my experience that Silverlight/Netflix give me better video streams (higher definitions, good framerates, very few times it needs to stop to buffer), and my PC runs cooler, than Flash videos, for whatever reason.
I especially noticed this when I had a laptop - I would notice the laptop get VERY hot when watching videos from Hulu (which uses Flash), but it only got warm, not hot, with Netflix videos. The Netflix videos consistently seemed to have higher video qual
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But Silverlight vs raw video streams? Absolutely no contest, I'd go with raw video. Why? Because my netbook can't play netflix videos without major stuttering (even when running absolutely nothing else, and at reduced resolutions, when hardwired into my network), and my old Droid 2 Global plays them fine over wireless.
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if it can be done for android, why not PC?
That's not the right question to ask. It CAN be done for PC. The reason why they chose to do it that way isn't because it can't be done any other way.
He was told that in the first place. (Score:2, Interesting)
It just took a LOT of wasted time for him to believe it.
Same old microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Create new technology
2) Market the hell out of it
3) Everyone gets hyped up, next big thing etc
4) Microsoft drops technology
5) repeat step 1
This has been their standard order of business for decades. Watch for the same thing to happen to "Metro" Microsoft's latest big thing..
Re:Same old microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, 3 is wrong.
In this case 3 was: nobody wanted this shit ever, forever and ever. People warned and warned and warned it was horrible, and Miguel along with Florian were the only people pushing for "oh, this is great, and it's open source!" (while not mentioning it was like 2+ years behind the entire time and MS would deliberately only support the latest versions) 4 and 5 still occur.
Same thing with windows ME, windows 8, the Ribbon bar, games for windows live, DRM pushed by intel/MS, etc.
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What I've noticed is that it's gotten worse since Bill Gates left Microsoft to Steve Ballmer. I'm guessing this has a lot to do with the fact that BillG was quite able to evaluate the technical merits of different proposals, while SteveB was not. BillG could act as a filter between the research teams that need to come up with the Next Big Thing (TM) to justify their existence and the MS marketing machine that is quite capable of hyping just about anything in the press.
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What I've noticed is that it's gotten worse since Bill Gates left Microsoft to Steve Ballmer. I'm guessing this has a lot to do with the fact that BillG was quite able to evaluate the technical merits of different proposals, while SteveB was not. BillG could act as a filter between the research teams that need to come up with the Next Big Thing (TM) to justify their existence and the MS marketing machine that is quite capable of hyping just about anything in the press.
Bill Gates thought the internet was a fad and tried to push their own closed wall AOL style web.
Microsoft got to the top of the computing world by adopting a criminal behaviour for decades. Whatever standard of excellence there was in Redmond (and it's hugely debatable) we'll never know since MS hasn't been able to compete honestly ever. Not a single time. Microsoft is a criminal enterprise from top to bottom.
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Re:Same old microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
Google surely wouldn't create a Buzz in the marketplace unless they were sure their product would be the Wave of the future, would they? ;)
Some of us are in fact non-Plussed by their entirely-too-sanitary products...
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Very nice post, I wish i had mod points.
A difference - MS creates platforms that you're supposed to build on. When MS pulls the rug from underneath you, you were building for quite a while. Wave got pulled early, too early to be a platform. Buzz never was. It makes for a lot lower impact.
Re:Same old microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is that when Google does this everybody yawns (except for the 10 or so who post blogs about how game changing it will be). But when Microsoft does this for a half-finished technology of theirs, everybody starts to go nuts and IT houses start hiring people with 5 years experience in it, all the analysts claim you need to have it, corporations create internal policies regarding it, and the Mono team starts investigating a cross platform version.
Re:Same old microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Like most R&D-heavy companies, Google will promote and hype their new product, but if it doesn't take off, it'll die a quiet death. Their successful products will be promoted continually, as a means to build up the brand.
Microsoft, on the other hand, promotes its new technology, and when nobody cares, they promote it more, deprecate the old system, tack on a new name, integrate it with their next new project, then finally declare it deprecated (but still fully supported) when the new replacement comes out.
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MS isn't the only offender, they're just the only offender to try using it for OS lo0ck-in and then throwing their weight around trying to cram it down people's throats.
Google creates a lot of things. Some stick, some are dropped. Some die quietly and just fade away. They tend to be multi-platform right out of the gate.
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Google seems to manage Linux support OK. Flash runs in Linux.
Silverlight isn't MS's only attempt at lock-in.
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I never claimed Google to be a paragon of virtue, only that lockin isn't amongst their sins. A big reason I don't mind Google so much is that there is a lot less attempt to cram it down my throat. I can more easily avoid their sins.
I do find it amusing that MS so over-played the lock-in strategy that they even locked themselves in.
Bad sign for good technology (Score:4, Interesting)
Silverlight really is a well thought out technology. It does a great job of abstracting the presentation layer from the code, and is pleasant to program. The tools for developing in Silverlight are nice, too. Too bad that it is showing signs of fading away - I think it had a lot of potential.
Re:Bad sign for good technology (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought the necessity for Silverlight (and Flash) was obsoleted by HTML 5? I think both these programs need to disappear.
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Many Microsoft sites that used Silverlight have moved to HTML5, and Microsoft is telling Silverlight developers to embrace HTML5.
Re:Bad sign for good technology (Score:4, Insightful)
The various browser implementations of HTML5 still haven't matured enough to reliably replace browser plugins in all cases. Specifically video playback support is still a mess due to all the codec patent issues. A recent project I worked on required us to encode the video in three different formats to cover all the major browsers. If we used Flash we would have only had to encode once. There is also no DRM solution for HTML5 video. This is a non-starter for many streaming companies like Netflix.
HTML5 get better everyday though, it's only a matter of time.
HTML5 convergence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:HTML5 convergence (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash is going away,
Flash is the new IE6. Ten years from now corporations will still be clinging to it while everyone else is running HTML17.
Re:HTML5 convergence (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bad sign for good technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Potential that could have been useful in, say, 1993...
Silverlight was supposed to be Microsoft's answer to Flash, but HTML 5 is already the generally-accepted answer to Flash. It was supposed to enable web-based applications to run on the desktop, but the widespread adoption of AJAX and other browser technologies has made that goal unnecessary, too. It was supposed to be a mechanism for Microsoft to claim dominance of up-and-coming technologies, but it's just yet another failure on Ballmer's running list of "too little, too late" achievements.
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Potential that could have been useful in, say, 1993...
Excessive hyperbole detected. The web was pretty awful and slow in 1993; it was all forms and fully synchronous page loads and total inability to find anything. Remember, you're two years before the first public appearance of Java and JavaScript at that point. Five years pre-Google. The company that created Flash [wikipedia.org] (though never gave it that name) was founded in 1993.
Silverlight would have done very well if it had been released in 1997 (a mere 10 years prior to its actual release) assuming that the computers
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Silverlight is part of Microsoft recent trend of systems that were too little to late, and not marketed well enough.
Microsoft actually lately has been developing some nice stuff... However they are failing to catch on because they are seen as near identical replacement of an existing product that is widely used.
Why develop for Sliverlight when everyone has Flash installed... Besides HTML 5 standards would be out soon.
Why get a Zune and buy software on the Microsoft channel, when Apple already has one, and i
Am I a bad person? (Score:5, Funny)
Am I a bad person to experience a Schadenfreude rush everytime Miguel, Facebook, Zynga or Groupon fails?
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Absolutely Not.
I was actually kind of giddy when Facebook shares started dropping the first day out.
I just head they are predicting $25 by mid-summer.
Re:Am I a bad person? (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely Not.
I was actually kind of giddy when Facebook shares started dropping the first day out.
I just head they are predicting $25 by mid-summer.
By mid summer?? It's $28 and falling TODAY
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Compared to Google's P/E, it should be around $16. And nobody knows yet if they can monetize their customers as well as Google.
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Most likely a sadist or a psychopath. ;)
Re:Am I a bad person? (Score:5, Funny)
> Am I a bad person to experience a Schadenfreude rush everytime Miguel, Facebook, Zynga or Groupon fails?
There's a whole online support group [slashdot.org] for people like us.
Hasn't silverlight been abandoned (Score:2)
Hasn't silverlight been abandoned?
First release in '07 and according to the wikipedia article the staggering market penetration of 0.3% (thats zero point three, I didn't drop a leading 9 or something...)
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It's still alive on Xbox. It drives all of the new media applications
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And another legacy monster is born. Microsoft has a peculiar expertise for loading itself down with this kind of cruft.
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Microsoft has decided to never implement WelGL in IE (IIRC) and supposedly this is because they're trying to push 3D features in Silverlight.
Oh look, Flash has built-in 3D features now, and actually has a user base...
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One word.
Netflix.
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A $60 ARM appliance makes far more sense for that particular use case.
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Wait, so Netflix works on my Win7 laptop, so I should go out and spend money on a $60 device so I can.. watch Netflix?
How should I hook up this device to my laptop when I am on the train?
Ahh! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm no fan of .NET, but I'm pretty sure the Mono developers aren't the only ones using it.
He is saying there is no future for Silverlight (the .NET based web plugin), not all of .NET. And that they won't put resouces into developing Moonlight (the open source version of Silverlight).
I know of two sites that use Silverlight, netflix and xfinity. They both use it just for the Microsoft DRM, afaik.
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Perhaps if you actually sit down and learned it, you may actually get a job. .NET is prevalent in Windows Application. If a company chooses windows for whatever motive knowing .NET will probably get you in.
.NET != Silverlight (Score:5, Interesting)
It isn't terribly surprising that Mono is abandoning Silverlight, since Microsoft seems to be doing much the same in favor of HTML 5.
The .NET Framework and tools in totality are a different story, though.
By the way, for those who haven't looked at it recently, MonoDevelop has come a -long- way. It's feature-comparable to Visual Studio, nowadays.
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How do we strong arm Ultra Violet distributors now (Score:2)
If you want to watch many companies Ultra Violet distributors movies you're stuck with Silverlight, at the prompting of one I tried to get Moonlight going but there wasn't a 64 Bit version.
Of course Sony takes and overall screw Linux position [wikipedia.org] even banning Linux browsers from logging into their website with cryptic error messages.
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I can't think of any ways that the 'consortium' behind it could make it any more of a user nightmare; but they seem to be doing their best.
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IT already has. Most people that buy a BLuRay disc that try to use the "UltraViolet Digital Copy" get pissed as it's already expired most of the time.
I get questions a LOT about it, I point the people at Handbrake and AnyDVDHD so they can make their own that will work on all devices and never expire.
Re:How do we strong arm Ultra Violet distributors (Score:5, Informative)
The funniest part about that Talk page is that "JimTheFrog" is, according to his user page:
So basically, that entire talk page is about the lead of that DRM-centric disaster defending what is fundamentally a customer-hostile technology. I'd call him a shill but he's probably tasked with "maintaining the message" on places like Wikipedia to make UltraViolet seem less fundamentally shitty than it is. And his dickish attitude towards Linux seems unsurprising, given that he
What will it be replaced with? (Score:2)
Silverlight, and even Flash, are dying out.
Don't get me wrong - that is a good thing - but I want to be able to watch Netflix, Youtube Videos, etc. in my browser and that isn't going to happen unless there is some way for my browser to handle DRM'ed video streams.
So, either HTML5 needs to add support for DRM'ed video, or users will only be able to use these services via 'apps' and obscure platforms will be at a huge disadvantage (e.g. Netflix isn't writing an app for the Playbook because the platform isn't
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Personally, I think that the hate that is felt towards DRM should be redirected towards proprietary DRM so we can break down platform lock-in and give the obscure platforms a chance with the average consumer.
Can't be done. Any open DRM platform will be trivially circumvented. In cryptographic terms, DRM is an attempt to send a message from Alice to Bob without it being read by Charlie. The problem is that in DRM, Bob and Charlie are the same person. The way DRM companies get around this is by hiding th
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Or maybe DRM needs to die once and for all, which is what most consumer are expecting.
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Any form of DRM has to be proprietary, the entire premise is based on security through obscurity... If the platform is not obscure, then it becomes even more trivial to circumvent.
It is DRM that should be abandoned, it serves only to screw legitimate customers through lack of player choice and bugs etc... It does absolutely nothing to stop piracy, if anything it encourages it because it enables the pirates to offer a superior product...
DRM is inherently broken because you have to give users everything they
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Personally, I think that the hate that is felt towards DRM should be redirected towards proprietary DRM so we can break down platform lock-in and give the obscure platforms a chance with the average consumer.
Trouble is, there is nothing but 'Proprietary DRM'. If DRM is 'open' it becomes quite trivial to produce a tool that is conformant in all respects, except that it silently ignores the various customer-hostile features(like those little HDMI converter boxes, that aren't supposed to exist, that report themselves as an HDCP compliant sink on one side; but spit out an unencrypted video stream on the other).
Thus, we see either single-party proprietary DRM(eg. 'Fairplay' where only one company holds the keys)
Re:What will it be replaced with? (Score:4, Informative)
. Take a look [w3.org] at this 'Encrypted Media Extensions' proposal. Most of it just lays out a bunch of proposed javascript for requesting keys and passing them to a decryption module whose implementation is left vague(aside from the one, seemingly completely pointless, 'simple' case where a static, known, key is used for no obvious reason).
Now, have a look at the goodies: In the diagram at the beginning "CDM may use or defer to platform capabilities". And look also at section 8.5:
"Can I ensure the content key is protected without working with a content protection provider?"
"No. Protecting the content key would require that the browser's media stack have some secret that cannot easily be obtained. This is the type of thing DRM solutions provide. Establishing a standard mechanism to support this is beyond the scope of HTML5 standards and should be deferred to specific user agent solutions. In addition, it is not something that fully open source browsers could natively support."
"Can a user agent protect the rendering path or protect the uncompressed content after decoding?"
"Yes, a user agent could use platform-specific capabilities to protect the rendering path."
So, unless you want to use the (seemingly entirely pointless) 'clear-key' case, this 'open' proposal boils down to a mixture of hot air and admissions that the good stuff would necessarily be implemented in closed (probably 'platform', which increasingly means 'cryptographically locked firmware') sections.
Can an OSS browser protect the key from the user? No. The specification explicitly says as much. And if the key is known and the cyphertext has been downloaded, the game is over. Period. So, right there, only closed (either binary-only or OSS-tivoized) implementations of key handling need apply. Can an OSS media rendering path protect the content from the user? No. The specification says as much. Only if media rendering is handed off to a binary or hardware/firmware component can that be provided.
Essentially, this proposal achieves the magnificent breakthrough of allowing a DRM streaming stack to use the browser's HTTP transfer mechanisms instead of those in the flash plugin. Key handling and media path? Those are either completely in the clear, or necessarily handed off to user-opaque sections.
Further, if you want to 'protect the media path' and ensure key security(even in a binary module) that implies such radical capabilities as protected memory regions that cannot be read by even the highest-privilege user-controlled processes(so, either a locked kernel, or an 'open' kernel under a locked hypervisor, PS3 linux style) as well as locked audio and video output paths, potentially locked cache areas on mass storage devices, and so forth.
Given this, it really comes down one of two ways: The first option is Tivoization: Yeah, it's 'open'; as in 'you could build the code and run it on some other hardware without a locked bootloader'. The second is some sort of TPM-style 'secure remote attestation' setup: It's 'open' as in "yes, you can modify it if you want; but remote hosts will refuse to deal with you if your attestation signatures come back nonstandard"(see also: Google/android DRM and what happens if you root your device...)
For good or ill, you can't make a piece of hardware serve two masters. If you want DRM to work, the platform must ultimately be controlled by the vendor, possibly with little sandbox areas for the user to amuse himself. If you want the user to control the platform, DRM cannot be more than a (perhaps frustrating, perhaps trivial) exercise in obfuscation and cat-and-mouse trickery.
No. Shit. (Score:5, Interesting)
If only someone could have warned you, oh wait someone did, _everyone_ in the world who has paid any attention to Microsoft's behavior over the last 20 years.
Miguel has supported:
the Microsoft "partnership" with Novell (disaster for Novell in the community)
OOXML/docx (deliberately obfuscated format mess)
C# (has a constant vague patent cloud over it that he dismisses)
Moonlight/Silverlight (a patent-encumbered flash clone, in an era when flash is going away, now shown to be a bad idea)
I used to wonder if Miguel was a Microsoft plant, now I wonder if he just has a learning disability.
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C# (has a constant vague patent cloud over it that he dismisses)
So, what is the alternative then? I'm sure that you are aware that Java has its own vague patent cloud these days. The market has shown that there is a need for a JIT compiled platform for architecture neutral binaries. If Java and .net are out then what can we use?
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There is no patent cloud over Java. This was proven less than two weeks ago. Plus, you are explicitly allowed to create compatible versions of the JVM (but cannot use the trademark Java unless you pay for the Test Compatibility Kit).
Note that the patent cloud over .NET is not for the C# language itself - that is indeed open. The .NET libraries are proprietary and protected by patents.
In short, if you are worried about creating a Java or .NET implementation then Java has a *much* safer legal foundation f
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I'd disagree. Encourage a swift and tidy wind up if you genuinely believe it to be a waste of effort. Do everything you can to wrap it up like that, *then* put it on github and see what happens. OSS developer time isn't an infinite resource, and it'd be best to divert as much attention as possible away from dead ends.
Silverlight was temporary anyway (Score:2)
Silverlight just like Flash was only ever going to be temporary anyway. They were both technologies trying to do the same thing of abstracting the GUI to something that crosses OS versions, platforms, etc. Once Flash started giving way to HTML5, the writing was on the wall for Silverlight. Soon, I imagine, we will have native apps for things the need deeper/privileged access to the platform (phone, tablet, desktop, whatever) and web-style HTML rendering for everything else.
Sometimes a manager's gut is right (Score:3)
My lead developer wanted to adopt Silverlight a couple years back for a key application we were developing. I am sure he had strong technical reasons, but getting tied to a highly proprietary Microsoft technology just smelled bad. .NET is one thing, Silverlight scared the hell out of me. I pulled out one of my rarely used veto cards and I'm glad I did.
Refrain (Score:3)
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restrictions (Score:2)
Uhm, what do we say now... let's try: We told you so!
How many endless debates in forums back in the day when Mono development started, all in vain.
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.NET never was that huge for desktop apps for most users, but it is HUGE in the enterprise world. HTML5 is the path for Metro tile apps, but Microsoft isn't abandoning all their enterprise customers with internal apps. .NET isn't going away. Mono in theory could allow these customers to shift to Linux, but I'm not sure anyone has really tried that.
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And it's HUGE on patch Tuesday, especially if it breaks the update completely and is retried repeatedly until MS fixes it.
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HTML5 is the path for Metro tile apps
HTML5/JS is a path for Metro apps. You can also write them in .NET and C++. In fact, writing them in C# is the easiest of three, because Metro APIs are heavily asynchronous (continuation-passing style), and C# 5 has convenient syntactic sugar [microsoft.com] for CPS; whereas in both C++ and JS you have to write out callbacks explicitly as lambdas.
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Do you say that about the StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice developers to make sure their products support Microsoft Office files.
How about those hard working people in the WINE project.
Heck those guys who make DOS BOX.
I for one would like much more positive community support from the Open Source community toward Mono. De-Windows .NET would open the door towards more cross platform applications.
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LibreOffice is just file formats.
screw WINE and DOS BOX, virtual machines run windows for those who want it, with a far superior compatibiliity.