Silverlight On the Way To Linux 475
Afforess writes "For the past two years Microsoft and Novell have been working on the 'Moonlight' project. It is a runtime library for websites that run Silverlight. It should allow PCs running Linux to view sites that use Siverlight. Betanews reports 'In the next stage of what has turned out to be a more successful project than even its creators envisioned, the public beta of Moonlight — a runtime library for Linux supporting sites that expect Silverlight — is expected within days.' Moonlight 2.0 is already in the works."
But how long will it be available (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there any reason not to think that this linux support will falter if Silverlight becomes widely used?
Novell == Microsoft lapdog (Score:4, Insightful)
"For the past two years Microsoft and Novell have been working on the 'Moonlight' project.
Translation: for two years, Microsoft has been using Novell to pretend they're not working on the Linux platform and aren't trying to embrace/extend it.
There ain't no way Silverlight will end up on my hard-drive. Having the Flash player is bad enough already.
Why Is Porting Needed? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would have expected MS to write a new app like that in 100% managed code. I assumed that the Mono project would allow me to run most managed code, maybe with some effort (but not 2 years by two major software houses)
If so, then I would have expected it to "just run" under Mono.
One of my assumptions is wrong.
Would rather Silverlight be GPL than this (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless there was an advantage to the lock in of flash why is there a reason to swap to another propitiatory product? Especially a linux clone that will always be behind Microsoft's offering.
If Silverlight was GPL and available for use by all then there might be a reason to adopt it over flash, but to just swap monopolies, no thanks.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Hrm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:0, Insightful)
When, oh when will the majority of the Linux community grow up their inferiority and superiority (yes, contradictory, I know, but nothing but the truth) complexes?
Form Wins over Function Again (Score:5, Insightful)
"Web 2.0" seems to be nothing more than a non-stop assault of useless animations, personalized/targeted advertisements, and automatically-loading and starting background music to make up for poorly-organized sites. Animated .gif banners, despite often being gaudy, were not so offensive as scripts that scour for statistical data about me to offer localized advertisements. The addition of new, non-standardized software to each user's browser is the worst way to embrace "The Cloud"; it focuses on style alone while only marginally catering to the needs of companies and their clients.
Silverlight will see some adoption by Linux users who cannot bear to browse the internet without clicking monkeys to win iPods. I doubt it would hit even that level of popularity before its current audience becomes so fed up with its more obnoxious aspects. The process of understanding Silverlight will be akin to that of installing Flash:
1) Install Silverlight/Moonlight to be amazed by a few useful applications
2) Install advertisement blocking add-on to avoid the droves of awful applications
3) Tweak blocking black/white-lists until Silverlight loses its appeal
4) Remove Silverlight/Moonlight
On the fringe out here I'll stick to elinks where I can get a majority of my information while avoiding information overload.
Re:there's one thing I'll stay clear of (Score:3, Insightful)
Or a plug in to eclipse
Re:What about a Windows release? (Score:5, Insightful)
What? Windows/OS X users prefer Firefox because they think it's better than the alternatives, not because they care about propietary soft [that much]. If the did they wouldn't be using Windows/OS X in the first place.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Would rather Silverlight be GPL than this (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just GPL, but GPLv3, because I don't trust M$ not to pull a SCO and try to sue Ubuntu, or Red Hat, or whoever they want to put the squeeze on.
Look - I don't want to be the "GPL is way better troll" here, but I trust those guys about as far as I can throw them.
Re:Javascript (Score:5, Insightful)
Try displaying text in any way other than in horizontal line (i.e. rotated, at least by 90 degrees) in plain HTML+CSS+JS, then we can talk.
May I present SVG?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Form Wins over Function Again (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:2, Insightful)
Adobe releases the first Flash player 64 bit on Linux (before doing it on other platforms), then they are using Linux users as beta testers and don't care about quality there...
I considered Adobe's move to be in reaction to Silverlight. Adobe would only prove this by releasing a stable 64-bit Flash version for Linux before or at the same time as the 64-bit Flash beta for Windows.
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:5, Insightful)
What you don't see is that Microsoft wants to have it both ways:
(1) Pretend Silverlight is open and crossplatform and supported everywhere
(2) In actuality, only the Microsoft version works.
The complaint merely states that anyone who buys into this doubletalk will be deceived. If you want a real crossplatform API that's more powerful than HTML+SVG, you really have only three choices:
(1) Java, which is now free software
(2) Pick the subset of Flash that works with Gnash so that your code will work everywhere.
(3) If Gnash is too limited, stick to the minimum version of Flash that supports the feature you need...unless you're extremely advanced, that version should be available on all major platforms.
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:3, Insightful)
What, all 2 of them?
Given that OS X still has higher desktop penetration rates than Linux, that's pretty much what it boils down to.
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Javascript (Score:3, Insightful)
SVG is a great thing, but even in non-IE browsers its support simply took too long to appear, unfortunately.
That, and animating SVG by hand using JavaScript is still quite sucky.
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:5, Insightful)
If that guy wants linux users to view his site, then he should use a technology that linux users can use. Silverlight is not the only technology to do the job. None of them are perfect. but when that guy made the decision to use silverlight, he knew that linux users were not going to be able to view his site. So no, he is not losing viewers because MS doesn't fully support silverlight. He chose a technology according to certain criteria and made the decision that linux users were not the target ones or not relevant enough.
It is exactly the same as writing a site in ways that only IE can display properly ( or the contrary as I have been know to do due to our user base)
Personally I don't really care about silverlight. if a site I go to uses it, then I assume that I am not the target user and go somewhere else. It is neither here nor there, the information will be available somewhere in another more friendly format, and if not, then I didn't really wanted to see it anyway.
Re:Why Is Porting Needed? (Score:4, Insightful)
How else could it be? If you want to open a file, you have to call the system API for opening a file somewhere down the line, eventually. Any high-level API, be it Python, Java or .NET, ends up with wrappers over API calls.
Some remarks and corrections (Score:5, Insightful)
Silverlight is not open source. Moonlight is. It is not a port, it is a sanctioned, but independent, rewrite, which is also related to advances in the Mono support for quite a few things that weren't there 2 years ago.
Those two words are contradictory: you need Microsoft's sanction (permission, as i understand) if you want to develop a 100% silverlight-compatible browser. (by the way, THAT's the difference between JavaScript and Silverlight). So how is it "independent"? Am I missing something here, my fellow slashdotters?
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this the irony of the situation. OSX and Linux basically came out of the gate with the same amount of following. Here we are in 2008, and who has actual market share? OSX...
What that should tell everybody is that MAYBE its not about "freedom". BUT MAYBE its about getting a computer to work when it should...
I am not saying Open Source is bad. Look at Apache, PHP, and co. Those projects work and are VERY popular. Even Linux server side has more damm success.
The GUI people need to start shifting gears...
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:5, Insightful)
> OSX and Linux basically came out of the gate with the same amount of following.
Yeah... the "same amount of following".
When was that first version of MacOS again?
Yeah, that's right: 1984.
If you're going to lie, come up with better ones.
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:5, Insightful)
He was careful to say "OSX", so his statement is technically true.
I don't think his conclusions are sound, though. The fact is, advertising has a real benefit and Linux advertising borders on non-existent - especially compared to Apple or MS. There are no "Ubuntu Stores", no Ubuntu counter at Best Buy... without this, Linux will not gather desktop market share approaching that of OSX or MS.
Note that Linux products that are advertised can be quite successful... EeePC, phones, routers, TiVo, server products, etc.
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:2, Insightful)
Realistically, how many viewers did he lose? 1000?
Wow. Your perception of reality is really screwed up, dude.
System requirements for Silverlight 1.0:
* Supported operating systems: Windows Vista and Windows XP Service Pack 2
* Supported browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Windows Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8, and Firefox 2.0.x.
and for Macintosh:
# Supported operating systems: Apple Mac OS X
# Supported browsers: Firefox 1.5.0.8, Firefox 2.0.x, and Apple Safari 2.0.4
That pretty much cuts everyone else out of the picture
According to some recent surveys, the pecerntage of people running Windows XP or Vista hovers around 90% [wikipedia.org]. Of course, this statistics are probably slightly skewed. Anyway, even ignoring any skew, the percentage of people on XP is around 70%, with 20% or so on Vista.
Okay, so out of those 69%, how many of those are running Service Pack 2? No, it's not 100%. But let's be generous and say it's about 80% of those. How many of those remaining have taken the extra step to install Silverlight, which is not automatically installed and does come installed by default?
Oh, probably 10-15% would be me guess. Most of the rest either haven't heard of it or can't install it by themselves because they lack the technical expertise. (Really!) Probably the same for Vista.
So, by this math, at least ~15% of Web users (accounting for those still using Windows 2000 and older) can't run Silverlight at all. And maybe 20-25% of Web Windows or Mac users have it installed (that's being generous)
So you have 15% who can't run it, 60% who can but aren't or won't, and 20-25% or are. That means about 75-80% of your potential Web users are, as of this date, cut out of the picture. That's pretty serious. So serious that at this point, the only major Silverlight websites that I've seen are Microsoft's (the Visual Studio Express site uses it).
Get a grip, man.
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:2, Insightful)
Exactly. Like with .NET and Mono, platform independent Silverlight is just a another MS promise which will never really work.
Like you should always do, don't trust MS words, wait for it to be real.
Good news (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's face it, if (hypothetically) Silverlight happens to become a common-place tech used on the Internet, then we're better off with an implementation in Linux than without. Even if that means binary-only and proprietary.
It's not ideal sure, but few things are in life. Give people who want functionality the means to do so in their OS of choice. If others wish to stick to their own principles, that's fine. They don't have to install the plugin, and can choose to miss out on the next Olympics stream or ability to use an upcoming HD movie service or whatever. But if people want such features, then cool beans, they've got the choice now.
I don't trust Microsoft either, but I've given up complaining about missing functionality in Linux. I just take whatever I can get, proprietary or not (including Flash and NVIDIA drivers). MHO.
Re:Javascript (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, granted that there are certain rocket sciency aspects to video encoding, I don't see how embedding a stream object and controls is something that cannot be accomodated in standard html, along with references to things like codecs. After all, a flash program is just an embedded object; all you need is the URL of the object and a URI for the codec.
Same goes for the huge javascript grid (although I have my doubts of its usefulness). Possibly, some kind of more efficient encoding of huge DOM objects might be worth considering if the table is built server side; othwerise, there is not reason that javascript could not build such a thing as fast as flash; the difference is that javascript implementations weren't optimized for that sort of thing. Certainly with JIT compilation and more efficient over the wire encodings I don't see the need for any of these proprietary systems. The effort expended in the market by content providers to deal with proprietary format wars could easily pay for making the necessary optimizations.
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:3, Insightful)
And as soon as the first Ubuntu store is opened, we'll have the vocal crowd of Debian zealots trashing it as a copy-cat... followed by the Gentoo "compiler-users" confusing everyone about sub-optimization, the RedHat corporate clients talking about the lack of a well established corporation and certifications...
Seriously, beside the graphical issues, there is no consensus in a single marketing brand. A distro name is rejected by other distros, and Linux can't be used as a brand, because in reality it is GNU/Linux, didn't it?
Static html (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll be opening a site next year that will be static html. There are wonderful tools to make static pages that are easily updatable. The use of static html doesn't mean a site can't be fresh. Yes, I'll have some fancier stuff in an associated forum but even the user-contributed content will be edited and added to the main site as static html.
Why am I doing it this way? I think the key (well, one of the main keys) to a successful site is simply knowing your audience and giving them what they want and need. If the first reaction of your target audience to a plain page of static content is "This is boring; I need to click somewhere else", then you need to employ fancier tools. If the first reaction of your target audience to a plain page of static content is "I need to read this to see if it contains information I can use", then static html is fine and dandy. Because I'll be targeting an audience that is older and cares far more about good, updated, detailed information than about eye candy, static html for my core pages is the right choice.
IT'S A TRAP! (Score:2, Insightful)
In other news... silverlight getting dumped... (Score:5, Insightful)
why didn't this make it onto slashdot then???
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually Moonlight is compatible with version 1.1, and it was a bigger progress from 1.0 then it is between 1.1 and 2.0.
What's really important is that the overall architecture is now in place. And Silverlight 2.0 is shipped with open source controls (under their permissive license) that will be used with Moonlight with little effort, among other components like DLR.
Also, Microsoft may have helped, but responsible for Moonlight, they are not.
Also, please consider that Moonlight will be in a much better shape than any open-source Flash or Java clones available.
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:People wonder why pro-OSS types have a bad rep. (Score:4, Insightful)
Having companies or people open source their software when not required (ie due to infringements or legislation) should always be treated as a generous act.
Re:you need more than games (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently you use a web browser written in Java so you don't have to wait for the JVM to load and initialize?
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm betting that these places have little Apple presence in terms of ads and Apple Stores, right?
Ubuntu has done a remarkable job considering that they have no real advertising. I mean, grassroots evangelism can do wonders - but look at how Firefox took off after the Mozilla Foundation started advertising in more traditional ways.
Re:What a surprise... backhanded support (Score:3, Insightful)