Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 14th Aug 2007 17:45 UTC, submitted by WillM
Microsoft "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."
Thread beginning with comment 263795
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE: Interview ...
by Touvan on Wed 15th Aug 2007 23:48 UTC in reply to "Interview ..."
Touvan
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?

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1