Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 30th Apr 2008 17:40 UTC
While the technologies used on the web have always been mostly free, with non-free technologies delegated to non-essential parts of the net, this has been changing fast, lately. The popularity of YouTube has demonstrated the pervasiveness of Adobe's Flash, to an extent where not having Flash is one of the big downsides to any alternative operating system. And to possibly make matters worse, Microsoft is pushing its proprietary Silverlight technology. The founder of Mozilla Europe, Tristan Nitot, warns for "the dangers of the proprietary web".
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Member since:
2005-07-07
> btw, can one reliably develop flash based content without some kind of tool from adobe?
Adobe have open-sourced the Flex SDK, so yes, actually.
To me that seems the wrong way round. They should've opened up the Flash format and kept the authoring tools proprietary. That's where there strength is and it's a model that's been shown to work for Photoshop, Acrobat and so on.
The short-sightedness of this plan will show if people start using Silverlight, thinking that Moonlight makes it a more open format. To me, Moonlight is a disaster waiting to happen.
I support Mono because you are always in control of the apps. Banshee or F-Spot will not break because of what Microsoft or some web developer did. If Mono and .Net ever diverge, who cares?
I can't support Moonlight because you are never in control of the app/content. Someone else compiles and stores in their own server. They have free reign to change something that breaks compatibility whenever they want, as do Microsoft.
It seems that most people ever support both or neither, but there's a huge distinction there.