Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 14th Aug 2007 17:45 UTC, submitted by WillM
"Microsoft, apparently, is helping the folks at Mono to port Silverlight to Linux. This is good news, as the primary fear I've heard from developers is that Silverlight will be locked to Microsoft platforms and products. Microsoft has already committed to supporting Silverlight cross-browser on Windows, and has a version that runs on Mac OS X (which is even available from the Apple web site). The last step is Linux, and Microsoft is working with Novell and Mono to make this happen."
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Member since:2006-09-01
since the Mono guys are rolling out a Silverlight port on Linux, if I were MS, I wouldn't even bother with a Linux port
You just touched on the most basic advantage that OSS has to offer. If Microsoft had a history with the OSS community (companies in that community too), and had simply open sourced their implementation (the mainline version, and with a reasonable license, one with patent grants or whatever, IANAL), they could have had this running on Linux, Firefox, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, you name it, with a lower compatibility failure rate (we'll see how that goes) since it's be the same code base, and could possibly have had it even faster (those Novel guys went pretty fast though, I have to admit).
Sun has figured this out. Adobe is starting to figure this out. When will Microsoft?
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Member since:
2005-11-13
I was listening to an interview recently on the DotnetRocks podcast with one of the main Silverlight guys at MS. They asked him about a Linux port, and he basically said there was a lot of demand from customers to be able to roll out Silverlight on Mac browsers, but not much demand on the Linux side. Most of the interest on Linux was being able to deliever this content froma Linux server.
Anyway, since the Mono guys are rolling out a Silverlight port on Linux, if I were MS, I wouldn't even bother with a Linux port, even if I wanted to do it, if the Mono guys were willing to do the work for me.
I also was listening to an interview with Miguel (whatever his last name is) on the same Podcast a couple of months ago, and he talked about how his team rolled out a Moonlight prototype in about 3 weeks. Didn't mention anything about MS helping, as I recall.
Edited 2007-08-14 18:07