Aral Balkan

Now this is interesting. Apparently, the Miguel de Icaza's team at the Mono project has implemented nearly all of Silverlight for Linux, and in record time (21 days!) I can only assume that this is a sanctioned project by Microsoft (it was developed by the Novell-sponsored Mono team and Novell and Microsoft appear to be in bed together quite a bit these days). It definitely goes a long way to addressing the initial criticism of the lack of cross-platform support in Silverlight.

What caught my attention is how quickly they were able to port it over from .Net to Mono. I wonder if Microsoft may actually stand a chance in wooing the Linux crowd with synchronized releases of Silverlight across all platforms?

Then again, what am I saying? How can they ever hope to woo the Linux crowd when Microsoft is out to destroy open source by demanding royalties from open source projects they claim infringe software patents that Microsoft owns? I wonder if Microsoft's smiley patent is part of this? Remember, honest coders don't use smileys in their code! Oh yes, and stay clear of XML too (Microsoft has patented XML serialization/deserialization) if you don't want lawyers at your door.

Regardless, it's a good thing that Adobe finally has the latest version of the player available for Linux and I'm sure that this new move by Novell/Microsoft will mean that we can expect synchronized releases of the Flash player across platforms in the future in order to Adobe to remain competitive. In other words, the only good thing I see about Microsoft's continued existence today is that it provides a competitor to Adobe and competition is a good thing that should benefit developers.

Comments

• bump... previous comment may have gotten lost in moderation queue...? [this bump can be deleted]

  by John Dowdell on 2007-06-26 14:52:18

• As far as I remember that was always the plan, Silverlight was called WPF/e, e standing for "everywhere". It's not as powerful as full WPF (windows only) but it's going to be a good alternative to flash and I think it'll be pretty popular among the .net fans who've been reluctant to get into fl[ash|ex]. Shortly after the first version of .net ms released a large amount of source code to kick start the mono project (Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure). Given the size of the organisation, I can imagine that the people shouting about patents have never even met the people releasing source code and supporting linux.

  by Thom Shannon on 2007-06-22 09:32:30

• Hi Thom, Yep, I've been following Silverlight since the earliest days of WPF/e but the interesting thing here is that it's not Microsoft who implemented it for Linux but a (somewhat related) third party. I don't think it's really relevant whether or not the people releasing source code and supporting Linux at Microsoft have met the people threatening open source projects with patent litigation. At the end of the day, Microsoft does Steve Ballmer's (and its board's/shareholders') bidding. And that Steve character is a seriously messed up puppy who (a) I don't approve of, (b) I don't trust, and (c) I make a conscious effort to avoid benefitting.

  by aral on 2007-06-22 09:56:30

• "...stand a chance in wooing the Linux crowd ..." I wonder what the Linux crowd hates more, microsoft or flash? Both get equal and predictable levels of hate when discussed at "hotspots" like slashdot or reddit...

  by sakri on 2007-06-22 12:33:43

• Strange that many Linux users hate Flash. Probably because hardcore Linux (like many Slashdotters) users are so often heavy left-brained types who are more comfortable in the pure text areas of thought and interaction, and less adept with graphics, animation and art. That's a shame. I wouldn't trust Microsoft's motives in extending Silverlight to Linux any more than I could easily spit out a rat. And although I don't really think Adobe's motives are the highest either, and were it not for Silverlight threatening the Flash platform they perhaps would be going for the same monopolistic control of the market like M$ currently has, I think M$ is very dangerous to the Linux community, and Adobe would do well do go more open source in their marketing efforts. M$'s 'deal' with Novell and others seems to me to be a classic case of "divide and conquer", buying off the weaker distros and sowing more distrust and F(ear)U(ncertainty)D(oubt) among potential Linux users and among the already fractious Linux user base. Linux's greatest strength, it's free and open source kernel, also is it's biggest weakness, because it allows too many people too much freedom to do whatever they may want to do, i.e. create yet another Distro which introduces more subtle incompatibilities between Linux 'flavors'. How can the Flash player, or the Silverlight player for that matter keep up in the long run with this version of Linux and that version of Linux? If the Distros become too divergent, then nothing really has been gained, and M$ has won the battle without even lifting a finger, because the lack of unity in the Linux community has already planted the seeds of it's own demise. "F--- Debian!" "Red Hat Sucks!" "Eat my Gentoo!" What M$ has over and above Linux isn't the money, what they do have is strong and centralized authority (however imbalanced and 'dio' [DYE-OH -> evil, unrighteous]) which will kick ass any day of a more righteous, but less unified, opponent. The Linux crowd may have to learn unity the hard way.

  by asai on 2007-06-22 15:48:22

• After reading about the Silverlight implementation on linux, i decided to check out Silverlight myself and install the plugin on my mac. Sadly for some bizzare reason the installer failed claiming i had an out of date version of OS X (even though it is the latest), and so i quickly lost interest. Still i think Silverlight is a good idea, if only just for encouraging viable competition in the RIA marketplace. I have a feeling that if the OpenLaszlo (http://www.openlaszlo.org) guy's go and make a Silverlight compiler for their appliation platform (which already supports Flash 7 and Java ME), things will start to get very interesting.

  by James Urquhart on 2007-06-22 21:28:40

• I've often thought about the linux distro issue myself, perhaps this is also the reason why large software firms don't bother to support it... Such a pitty... all they need is an open standard... I love linux to bits... but i really miss a few big name software brands...

  by ryan on 2007-06-24 01:08:43

• I have no time so I keep my comment short: I AGREE!

  by sascha/hdrs on 2007-06-24 14:14:10

• Aral, Off topic i know, but i have tagged you with the 8 random facts meme. If you have the time, please join in. :) Regards James

  by James Urquhart on 2007-06-24 19:51:55

• I completely disagree. WPF/e and Silverlight are not viable web 2.0 realities. At best, they are simply "Microsoft 2.0" reinventions of yet again listening just a little to their own folks and ignoring trends in the market today. I am a Microsoft developer (VB and C# to 2005 ... started VB in version 3, including the Visual DOS version) and have been working with ASP (to .NET 2005) since 1993, so I am not new at this. Mind you, I have also been working with Adobe Flash (to CS3) since Macromedia Flash (version 2.) I am in now way just jumping on the bandwagon and confused about what web 2.0 actually is. Let me explain what I mean by "I completely disagree." About half a decade ago there was a very popular product called "Shockwave." Shockwave content was built, first, using a tool called "Macromedia Director." Director was quite popular but twice as expensive as it was popular. Soon grew up Flash, which did a lot of what Director did minus the 3D stuff. Soon, so much focus went into building both the visual design elements of Flash and then later the advances of the ActionScript language. Director and it's 3D capabilities were soon left behind. Here is the funny bit. Nobody seemed to care that Director and its 3D went away. Business and marketing groups didn't feel the demand for that required an continued investment in Director. Firms like ElectricRain built some cheater 3D tools for flash and the market was more than satisfied. The bottom line is that the whole full comunication loop is completely functional for flash, in getting the front and back end systems to communicate. There are no holes. No juryrigging required. And Flash can talk to web services and retrieve and create XML and submit data. If Flash suddenly wanted to implement some robust 3D engine, I am confident that they could convert some retired Director code, but I think you will find that the eye-candy microsoft is pimping right now (called Silverlight) is just eons behind what is already out there. The trouble with this whole thing is that MS catches you with the eye-candy, but after you take the time to investigate and invest you only then realize that there isn't enough under the hood yet. I am not saying Flash doesn't do the eye-candy thing. They just have a mature engine under the hood (and did I mention the player is open source, and so is ActionScript, and so is Flex, etc.) If anyone has anything more to complain about with Adobe Flash, then people are just wanting something for nothing. I hate to say it, and I am all for alternatives and competition, but trading down to Silverlight from something like Flash would be like choosing an abacus rather than buying a computer. More power to the MS community for trying to grow this up, but right now it isn't nearly mature enough. It is another MS geek-toy (notice that the vector precision isn't good enough to pass QC in any art department anywhere!) I wouldn't recommend backing this product in your companies any time soon. If your biggest argument for pursuing this is that you don't want to learn another programming language (ie. ActionScript), but you know JavaScript (JScript) and/or C#, then there is good news for you. ActionScript shares the same parents as C# and JavaScript (JScript): ECMAScript specification. You are likely already more than equipt to start banging out code behind Flash and Flex (which, the flash player 9 already has a 83% market saturation with 98% for Player 7) than you think!

  by McHoyt on 2007-06-25 21:46:10

• Hey John, Checked the moderation queue, nothing from you in it. I think your previous comment may have been lost. Sorry. Can you please resubmit it (or send it to me via email and I'll post it for you.)

  by aral on 2007-06-26 15:39:12

• Silverlight/Linux... Silverlight/Linux: This is actually a comment to Aral Balkan's blog, which I've typed out and submitted twice, but which has disappeared twice, so I'm republishing it over here. Aral wrote on Friday about that "Ported to Linux in 21 Days!" story, ...

  by JD on EP on 2007-06-26 19:35:56

• "I completely disagree. WPF/e and Silverlight are not viable web 2.0 realities. About half a decade ago..." The world changes...echo boomers have all the power and money in the marketer's eyes. If you look at other WPF/XAML projects like Acropolis and Surface, Microsoft is for far ahead in recognizing the market trends and developing products that address their needs that they will be leaving the competition firmly in the dust. The reason the compettion is struggling is that they are still looking at things like they we're 10 years ago and assuming the same demands and requirements for the web exist...they don't....and yester-years technologies don't have what it takes to address what users will be demanding from the web in the next decade.....Web 2.0 is entiely about Bling, and 3D will be firmly at the center of it....

  by Allen on 2007-06-27 13:04:53

• Again, nothing new by the MS team. Acropolis is Visual Studio on WPF, not WPF/e (very different.) And while I think there may be a future for 3D (or at least in non-traditional multidimensional interaction UX), it is just not new by all means or, most importantly, what I was saying was that the MS XAML 3D UX is not feature-rich enough yet nor is it honed enough in its user interaction model. It is still playing catch-up. As for MS "surface", while I am from the U.S., I freelanced with a group out of Canada two years ago that pioneered a "surface" like application that would project onto any surface including glass (which means that it worked like MS Surface) and allow people to interact with and alter the state of the screen (it used two cameras to determine interaction in three dimentions; something MS isn't doing yet.) Check out www.gesturetek.com (specifically GestureFX is who I worked with.) And you won't believe what was being used to develop the actual applications that interacted with the hardware... (drum-roll please) FLASH! Yes. You can see this technology in place today at movie theaters on the floor, outside businesses in Chicago on Michigan Ave. and in NFL stadiums across the U.S. I contest that we continue to experience the marketing of Microsoft and while I am fine with that, we don't need to go all googly-eyed and think that we are becoming early adopters to a new technology front. I am fine with a free and open market and want MS to get good at this. We can only benefit from the competition. But right now, this is not new tech, just new marketing for a less-than fully-featured alternative.

  by McHoyt on 2007-07-03 20:33:13

• Thanks guys getting Silverlight working on Linux, but we are scrapping our entire Linux infrastructure anyways, so, its back to Windows for us. I've been looking at some of the silverlight websites, and they look awesome!

  by David Sumter on 2007-09-06 19:48:40

• Silverlight is closed technology and should not be supported by persons who believe in free software and freedom. Silverlight is fighting against this freedom. Do I want silverlight on linux? No thanks, I will pass.

  by Freedom first on 2009-07-29 10:11:18