The Mono project has released Moonlight 2, the open source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight. Moonlight allows Silverlight content to run on platforms that do not have an official Silverlight client, such as Linux and PowerPC Macs. Microsoft also expanded its patent agreement with Novell to cover all users of Moonlight, no matter the Linux version.
Moonlight 2 isn’t just on par with Silverlight 2 – it also implements several aspects of Silverlight 3, such as Silverlight 3 pluggable pipeline, easing animation functions, partial out-of-browser support, writable bitmaps, and some of the new databinding features of XAML in Silverlight 3. The goal is to make sure that several important Silverlight 3 applications, such as Sunday Night Football and the coming Winter Olympics, work in Moonlight.
“Moonlight 2 is the result of love and passion to bring the Silverlight runtime to Linux,” Miguel De Icaza writes on his blog, “Moonlight 2 engine consists of 142000 lines of C/C++ code and 320000 lines of C# code (125000 lines of code came from Microsoft’s open source Silverlight Controls). Moonlight is built on top of Mono 2.6 runtime, Cairo and Gtk+ and today supports Firefox on Linux. We are hard at work to support Google Chrome on Linux as well.”
A new patent agreement has been put in place as well. The old agreement covered Moonlight, but only if it was obtained through Novell. The new agreement extends this to all other possible ways to get Moonlight, meaning every Linux distributor can ship it without the fear of getting sued by Microsoft over patents. The Mono project worked together with Microsoft to make this happen.
“A really important change in how the community and individuals will see and use Moonlight is a change and extension to the patent covenant that Microsoft provides to Novell and its end users,” Brian Goldfarb, director of Web and user experience platforms at Microsoft, told InternetNews, “We’re now increasing the reach of the agreement – Microsoft’s commitment not to sue Novell or Novell customers now extends to redistributors.”
One problem remains, and as you can guess, it’s the codec issue. Microsoft may have paid for licenses for various codecs and may have made sure that Novell could use them too, but this of course doesn’t extend towards other distributors. To solve this, distributors can negotiate directly with the owners of the codecs (MPEG-LA, Fraunhofer, etc.), they can obtain access to Microsoft’s Media Pack, or use Gstreamer or other commercial codec licenses.
“We are deeply committed to the success of Moonlight and having a highly compatible implementation of Silverlight for Linux,” Goldfarb explained to InternetNews, “That commitment spans more than just words: we provide Novell with tests, specifications and engineering consulting, and we’re really ramping that up even more to help accelerate the timelines for future versions of Moonlight.”
Indeed, support for Silverlight 3 and 4 will also be built into Moonlight, together with Microsoft. Whether I like Silverlight or not (I don’t – but it is miles ahead of Flash when it comes to resource usage), it’s a good thing that Linux users have access to a fully open source and re-distributable implementation of it.
You can get Moonlight 2 from its download page.
Thank you Microsoft and thank you Novell.
And I say: “Thanks but no thanks.”
Flash and Silverlight AND Moonlight have to die a slow painful death.
Extent HTML5 to do what you need to do, but don’t use big browser plugins that only work on a small subset of devices.
They always suck, always, without exception.
Gladly, but sadly, with the pace standards are developed, we might see the finalised HTML 5 spec around the time the stone gets put on my grave.
But yes, they obviously need to die.
So? HTML5 is already working in browsers now. HTML5 is not a standard where we wait for the final call to be made before we do anything with it. It grows and finalises as the _implementations_ grow and finalise too. The spec learns just as much from what vendors are doing as what the spec asks them to do.
Google are already rolling out HTML5 features in chrome, have been doing so for ages. Firefox just added the file API allowing developers to accept drag-and-drop files, query images for their EXIF metadata and size &c, before the upload even occurs. Heck, using canvas you can manipulate the image without ever uploading it to the server.
Then there’s the people writing games in JS http://www.megidish.net/awjs/ ,
emulators http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/ , there’s 3D with WebGL too, on mobile devices even.
HTML5 is taking off. Developers and browser vendors are playing with the possibilities and the results are astounding.
Your attitude to the standard is outdated.
Edited 2009-12-18 18:26 UTC
HTML 5 needs to be a defacto standar, if moonlight and flash are not standars, why would HTML5 be considered differently?, but that’s just one thing, how about the tools to build an HTML5 standar professional webpage? do you spect we use notepad? what tools are available that leverage the power og HTML5? now, the broswers, Google keeps adding new features to HTML standars, when will it be finished and stable?.
The job is not for use to waith for them, the job is for them to hurry.
Edited 2009-12-18 18:33 UTC
Never forget this:
With nothing but Notepad, you can write the most successful website in the world. You can compete directly with the biggest corporations with the biggest budget, regardless of your status, your class or your income.
I do not want to live in a world where somebody like Microsoft dictates what tools I use, and what OS I run them on, in order to contribute to the Internet.
So _yes_. Use Notepad if you want. Use anything _you_ want. Make your own tool if Notepad is not good enough.
I’ll spend my entire life to be competitive with notepad mean while others using professional tools will finish first and will get pay first, and becuase I need to eat and make a living of it, and who knows when I finish with notepad there will be another standar already.
I really wonder if you do this for a living and if you do I wonder if you do bussiness web applications and not just the classic shopping car.
I’m competitive with a text editor (TextMate), but Notepad would suffice. In fact, I’m well ahead of the curve—I’m developing on the cutting edge. I’m writing code that WYSIWYG tools _can’t_ do because this stuff requires _skill_ and knowledge. If you want the _best_ website, you _have_ to hand write it. If you want the fastest site, you _have_ to hand write it, because the tools cannot think for you.
I’m hand writing the next version of OSnews. It is going to be faster than any other news site. It will be incredibly elegant, and well designed, and it will be HTML5. It will work in IE. It is the best piece of code I’ve ever written and it is leagues ahead of the game.
If you can’t compete with Notepad, then you don’t know your craft well enough. Get learning, all the knowledge is freely available on the Internet.
So, you are handcrafting a web forum basictly, you don’t have a deadline and a customer who is waÃting for the results yesterday, yo don’t need to show complex reports that will be need to be exported to excel, pdf or formated nicely in html, you don’t need to assing rights per user, per station and syncronice data from diferrent databases at nigh in a reliable way so the information is fine and dandy at 6:00 a.m. not less, and this is only just the beggining i won’t talk about the complicated processes. I agree with you that some parts need to be hand made, I do that, but there are other parts that it doenst matter if you have the powerful text editor in the world, you need other tools that the standars doesn’t cover yet.
I have the benefit of being freelance, I choose the jobs, I set the standards. Not everybody gets that benefit, and businesses cut out the planning, cut corners and create the very organisation / planning problems that you describe.
You seem to be referring more to internal b2b stuff; If you need average, good-enough results for business people then yes, no problem using quick tools. For a public website, where milliseconds count, then that is where I am saying that hand coding runs circles around being lazy.
But we are talking about standars, not performace, but anyway, we have different points of views and I respect your as I know you respect mine.
The standards are definitely coming now that the whole web has been reignited. Microsoft have jack all to do with progress, Google / Apple are baking in all the features developers want.
There’s no question that the standards don’t cover everything—like webcam usage in a webpage that Flash can do. Again, the standards are coming, the implementations will come even sooner. The last five years of the web will in no way resemble the next five years.
I respect, as an OSnews user, your here because you know your stuff, and must live within the practical world. My goal is to make what you do much more open, with more tools available (instead of relying on one vendor). I won’t ever do an office job again because I couldn’t stand how badly inefficient development was in companies. Anybody who makes a success of this difficult environment is better than me.
And like you I welcome the standars because at last standars are better for me, like using a single .css and now one per browser you know or using less java scritp. but I like standars that rise the bar (or at least put it in equal circunstanses). HTML5 is a stept forward no doub, but is not there yet.
That is what I am trying to demonstrate, but OSnews is not the audience for that, a lot of people see only the now, and just because HTML5 doesn’t do this or that, or isn’t fast enough _now_, then it’s simply not a valid choice. This annoys me, because it’s very clear to me that HTML5 and the web is where we are going, like it or not. It’s not about whether the web is better than what we have now, everything is moving to the web in the long run and right here, right now I’m doing plenty well with HTML5 thanks, whilst other developers aren’t even interested until the spec is “final”—whatever that really means since it’s only as final as the implementations.
Ignoring the implied personal attack upon the entirety of this site’s readership…
Perhaps you will do better if and when HTML5/Javascript/CSS *can* do these things, and with adequate performance. And assuming, of course, that it can compete with alternatives available at that time. And do what they can do at that time.
Edited 2009-12-18 20:38 UTC
Exactly, Steve.
HTML5 is frakking awesome. It allows us to a whole boatload of things in an open way, without locking us into stuff we don’t want (save for Apple being dicks regarding video). Accessibility-wise and indexing-wise, HTML5 is really, really cool.
But right now, it simply IS NOT COMPLETE. That is a fact of life we have to deal with NOW. We may wax lyrically about how it one day will take us by the hand and guide us to the promised land, but that doesn’t magically make the problems of TODAY go away.
I dislike Flash and Silverlight as much as the next guy (yes, you, person commenting below me), but they are here NOW, and therefore, I have to use them. Yes, HAVE to. I enjoy YouTube, Dumpert.nl, and will surely use the Winter Olympics site coming February.
Edited 2009-12-18 20:58 UTC
And HTML5 video works fine already. It’s the vendors that are the problem for using Flash/Silverlight. That’s a whole other side of the problem though.
You say HTML5 isn’t capable of doing things things, and that’s wrong. YouTube can be done in HTML5, it just isn’t yet. It’s not that the winter games can’t be physically broadcast using HTML5 video becaue HTML5 doesn’t allow it. Of course it can, the vendor is the one making the choice here.
That’s like calling Python a crap language because Rails is written in Ruby.
Can the video tag really handle streaming?
Another point: While you are theoretically as powerful with notepad as Google with Java and Google Web Toolkit in this cruel world we experience as reality you aren’t.
Google Wave cannot be build with notepad PERIOD You just need GWTs features to build such a big web app.
PS. I am kinda embarrassed that I dug down so deep into this thread
Right, but you can write GWT in Notepad, and GWT is partly a Java framework, which you can write the Java asbtract of the site you want in Notepad too. Nowhere in the GWT toolchain are you tied to one OS and one editor. That’s the big difference.
Sure, but GWT only works on the major three platforms and with notepad you would loose Eclipses fast compilation and the debugger etc.
I’m just saying that sometimes you need tools to help you. They can make things faster and reduce complexity.
With GWT Java developers with no clue about JS can write really complex web apps. That is certainly very different from the handcrafted HTML5 you are talking about.
True, but the tools are not mandated. Yes, they definitely help, and make things easier. Why would you use Notepad when you have TextMate? But the point is that if you’re a poor person with only a beat up 300 MHz PII running Linux, you can still compete with the world. It’s harder sure–but not _impossible_. That’s the key difference. Silverlight/Flash/Flex/AIR cannot provide equality to the citizens of the web. It favours only those rich enough to buy in.
To exagerated use case but I don’t know about flash, but the Silverligh compiler is free just like the .net framework, so a poor person can have access, even the Visual Studio express editions are free.
Free up to a point. It’s no good if there’s a pay-ceiling, free tools scale, freemium ones only scale so far before you have to rewrite using free tools if you want to keep costs down. Plus Microsofts tools are designed to make you use Windows, keep you on Windows and develop primarily for Windows. That’s hardly freedom nor a good model for developers starting out.
Still a lot better than notepad, and what other option beside windows may have for web developing? if your imaginary friend can’t affort windows will affort OSX? Linux for desing?, and what fredom do you have using TextMate, can you use it on windows and linux?, what if he needs to test his work in IE, you know the most popular browser, what will he use? this is getting ridiculous. Im off of this topic.
Edited 2009-12-19 19:43 UTC
Didn’t Kroc demonstrate an HTML video-player, that would use the HTML5 video tag if it was supported, fall back to Flash if it wasn’t, and even still have a sane page-layout with a download link when it couldn’t find flash? If that’s technologically possible now, on most of the browsers of today… then what’s the problem? I mean, youtube may not use Kroc’s code, but you could, and if it works, it works, yes?
If you’re developing a new piece of software, future-proofing it makes sense to me. Especially that platform is capable of falling back gracefully to the technology of today.
Maybe I’m just a neophyte idiot.
Edited 2009-12-18 21:21 UTC
As far as html5 on youtube goes, most everything’s already in place there. You can switch it on with a simple greasemonkey script. I’ve been using youtube like that for a while, and it works great.
Ignoring the implied personal attack upon the entirety of this site’s readership…
For that I apologise. I am at the end of my tether, stressed, impatient and increasingly feel like I am bashing my head against a wall when it comes to this prevelant attitude to HTML5 that is stuck in the olde-world of those IE6 days where the browser was kept as dumb and incapable as possible.
And many of us feel like we are bashing our heads against a wall when it comes to web developers who constantly tell us that the web is the new platform and that HTML5 is good enough.
It’s not. It’s nowhere near good enough. I’m glad that Javascript is suitable for the things that you do, but it is not, nor will it ever be useful for any of the things I do. What is most aggravating is that there are free and open technologies that are available right now that can change this situation if only the W3C had the foresight and the courage to act.
Tragically, what we’re seeing is that HTML5 and the W3C are following the same path that led to the marginalization of OpenGL for so many years. We have a standards body that is too slow to react and too weak when it comes to making necessary changes. Because of this, open standards get fractured by platform specific extensions and eventually overrun by proprietary technologies.
The W3C is failing in the same way that the OpenGL ARB (and now Khronos) have failed.
If that’s the worst problem you have to contend with, then I’ll happily trade lives with you.
A minor quibble: the web is the best way to do some things, but not everything. You’re probably right, every task that can move into the browser probably will in the near future, like it or not; but not every task we use computers to perform can move into the browser. Some things will probably never make the transition — I’m thinking specifically of non-casual gaming, like TF2, to which I am addicted, but there are probably any number of other tasks that you can’t really shove into the browser, like content generation.
Honestly, I suspect that everyone will be really enthusiastic about browser-based apps and cloud-everything for a while, people will try browser-based 3D gaming, browser-based digital photo editing, browser-based whatever else… and realize that it just doesn’t work nearly as well as doing those jobs with native apps on a Desktop. And the Desktop will stick around, and continue doing those jobs just like it has for quite a while now.
Of COURSE it’s not a valid choice. I don’t know what world you live in, but most of us live in the REAL world, where REAL work must get done. TODAY.
It’s probably where we’re going, but it’s going to be at least 10 (and probably more than 20) years before we get there, and by then, we’ll probably be up to HTML10, where the language itself barely resembles what we’re using now, and the development tools will be completely different anyway. If you think the web is where we’re going, call me when you can burn a DVD using a web app, WITHOUT any plugins.
At the rate we are going, in 10 years we’ll probably still be on HTML 5. And in 20 years, HTML 6 might or might not be official. We’ve been on HTML 4 for over 12 years now and HTML 5 isn’t finalized yet, and isn’t expected to be for at least another year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#HTML_version_timeline
Edit: And then I read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_5#Completion
Edited 2009-12-18 23:00 UTC
You do have a point there. Office coding has its drawbacks. I see base code pulled apart and rewritten year to year because people pulled in from elsewhere with their own ideas jump in with the ear of the CEO and jam some new, unnecessary technological fad down the pipe…
Not quite on topic, I know but…
Anyway, I do all of my work via UltraEdit and TextMate, but then again I also do not generate graphics, I code. I use CSS and (when I must) Javascript for the HTML UI, and Java behind the scenes (tho’ I would prefer a different base to be building on).
Many co-workers are shocked when they discover I am not using MyEclipse or Eclipse for my work and do builds via ant on the command line, etc.
That was always my fear: I’ve heard horror stories about people who can basically only work with Java inside Eclipse, have a very weak grasp on what’s actually going on when their code executes, and just get carried through haphazardly slapping their code together with immense help from the IDE. I’ve never wanted to be that coder, and I’ve long been a proponent of gvim, an xterm, and Makefiles.
That’s actually something of a culture conflict where I work, because a lot of the other programmers here come from Java or C# backgrounds, and think that’s an extremely antiquated viewpoint, and that my productivity would be immensely greater if I’d just start letting a well-designed IDE do a lot of the grunt work for me. And they may be right, but I’m enormously terrified of becoming a Java Cobbler.
Ditto! Same thing where I am.
So…. you enjoy writing boilerplate code? If you aren’t writing it and rather have it saved off in a file, then what is the difference between that and an IDE except for the time it takes to do it? You wrote it? big deal.
besides that, languages with huge frameworks under them were meant to be “cobbled” together, if by that you mean reusing highly optimized code.
The world you need to fear is where researchers are trying to taking it… Modeling that generates most of the code for you. My graduate prof is researching that with UML right now…. not sure why he chose UML when formal modeling languages are much more expressive and precise… you would think it would be easier to generate code from that.
Of course not, no one is.
The issue in this subthread is about ‘professional programmers’ who *depend* on tools to do this for them because they couldn’t do it themselves, since they actually don’t know/understand what is going on ‘under the hood’. Their knowledge is, in effect, very shallow.
And once you understand the boilerplate code (and the reasons for it), then sometimes/often, you can do it yourself much better than the tool can.
Once I understand what the boilerplate code is doing, I let the tool deal with it because it gets in the way of productive work. and doing myself would not improve the efficiency of my product more than the time it takes the write the stuff.
Professionals need to know what and how the boiler plate code works no matter what they are doing with tools so that they can customize it when needed.
Edited 2009-12-19 22:22 UTC
these gifs can be difficult to pull off at first though
Possibility != likelihood.
Also, why in the world would you want to? I doubt I’ve used Notepad to edit an HTML file since 1997 or ’98. Using Notepad, when there are more sophisticated code/HTML editors available, is masochism on par with wearing a hair shirt.
Woohoo! With Chrome I can run a NES emulator full speed! Yeah! My dual core 2GHz computer can finally emulate a Motorola 6502 based system in a web browser! I’m so impressed!
Wake up people, web browsers as a development platform suck. They were not made for applications and even less for games. HTML5 will not change that, it will merely add a few more features to the hackfest. Chrome might be faster than other browsers, but it merely reaches the level of a Pentium 100MHz (which could emulate the NES with full screen graphics and sound).
Silverlight is a much better platform to work with (as a developer) and it offers tons of great features; but yeah it’s proprietary and it’s a plugin so that really sucks.
In the end, they both suck, but for different reasons…
Couldn’t agree more. Silverlight is just another Flash or Java Applet that won’t run on my mobile web browser. If you need Silverlight for a web application you’re writing perhaps it shouldn’t be a web application.
I have a 3GHz Pentium 4 with HyperThreading and I can’t visit websites with more than 2 embeded youtube videos (all the stupid compilations on digg “Top 5 Fails”, “Top 10 MMA knockouts”, etc).
I forsee abuse of HTML5. Look at this…
http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/DynamicContentInjection/pl…
I saw some demo where they were playing an HTML5 video that had a green screen and using javascript to swap out the background. This crap doesn’t belong in a web browser.
perhaps I use silverlight so I can deploy my desktop app tot he web and transition to silverlight 4 and allow subscribers to my site to install it to their machines or use it on the webpage and access the data created from both locations in one place?
webbased desktop applications created through air, silverlight or even… HTML5 and javascript is the future of application delivery. People want access to their apps with or with out an internet connection, they like the feel of desktop apps, but they want the power of the web for information. Vendors in turn want a way to protect their product, offer services to their users in an inexpensive fashion and make money. Web based apps that can be installed to the desktop and feed the cloud answer this need.
BTW… Silverlight is on its way to the mobile world. The Pre and winmo already have it… Android is next when Eclair is available on most handsets by early next year. and as Mozilla recently said… appstores are going to die in the moble market because of the ability to deploy apps via mobile web pages using high speed javascript (and silverlight and flash).
I think the point is that it shows you can do almost anything in a web browser and have no codec, plugin OS platform limitations.
I don’t want to have to install Flash, Moonlight/Silverlight, QuickTime, Windows Media Player media codecs just to play or view stuff on the web. I think HTML 5 just makes it a lot more transparent for the user and that’s on all platforms.
You know, I’d rather not have my content sealed inside the browser, and have only the interface and capabilities that the browser allows. If I’m going to be watching video, I’d like to download it to my actually, physical local machine, and watch it with whatever player on whatever device I can get to work on. It’s neat that browsers are becoming so capable, and there are probably some tasks that it makes a lot of sense to move into the browser… but that’s not true of everything!
I like web radio a lot. I listen to WBUR Boston continuously at work. I do not use the damned web-based flash app, and I do not listen to web radio stations that do use those things, for exactly the reasons I mentioned. I’d much rather have the ability to use whatever client I want, including – for example, VLC or XMMS – that will be at least as powerful and feature-rich as any browser-hosted, flash-based application, and probably much more so. I don’t want my interactions with that radio stream to be limited to what the people creating the flash app felt like implementing.
It kinda ties into the whole “do one thing and do it well” design philosophy: I’d much rather have one extremely capable, local application, than a hundred bare-minimum browser-based applications all doing the same job.
Heh, that isn’t relevant to what you said at all, was it? My apologies.
Edited 2009-12-18 21:29 UTC
Wow. The future of computers… a game running at 12fps on my machine that is nearly 2 decades newer than the Amiga the game originally debuted on.
Why is the majority of the world convinced that everything should be in a browser? I’ll never know…
Which will be 24fps in a years time, double again in another year, and so on so forth.
Talk about miss the point. You’re not impressed by the fact that you didn’t have to choose the right binary for your system, download it, install it—then locate the ROM, download it, open the emulator, open the ROM and _then_ start playing.
Performance, concurrency and scalability are as important to me than it is for you, but that’s another subject, it has nothing to do with standars or tools or whatever. You can have even faster result if you don’t rely on standars did you even knew that?
JSNES is an extreme case that isn’t even meant to be practical right here and now. But it shows just how much browsers have improved over the last few years, and this is going to continue even faster going forward. Have some imagination, good grief. I’m going to live to regret commenting on this damn thread.
If you are looking for an old console emulator, then you most certainly know how to get it without having to suffer the pain of 12fps. Why people find more important installation, that only happens once, than normal and day to day usage?
Yeah. You stole my thoughts. Someone should write a big philosophical editorial about the big and devastating regression that the “web 2.0” has brought.
I mean that’s what this is all about: we are debating about how we can play videos? Hello? What year is this?
Edited 2009-12-19 06:55 UTC
Feel free to write it up if it moves you so, I think that would be a great read!
You say that like it’s a bad thing
Look how far we’ve come: 15 years ago, if you wanted to take part in an online discussion, there was Usenet – where you had a measly 2 or 3 levels of abstraction (a NNTP client, running on your OS, running on top of your hardware).
But today, to do the same thing, you get 5 or 6 levels of abstraction (web-based forum software using an API implement in JaS, executed by the JS interpreter of your browser, running on your OS, on top of your hardware). That’s progress, right?
While your point is well made I think you have given Google too much credit. Chrome has HTML 5 features due to all WebKit developers, not just Google, so any WebKit browser such as Safari or Epiphany is also making the new features available.
Agreed.
We don’t need proprietary closed systems to deliver content.
That is very very bad.
Particularly if it is scientific or political content.
We already have enough hank panky going on with Flash and Silverlight sites, we don’t need anymore.
-Hack
That is your wishful thinking and nothing else. Flash, Silverlight and Moonlight are moving on. Flash is being used by countless people daily.
I am not fan of those technologies, too, but they are here to stay. One should learn to live with it, like it or not.
Your dramatic posts are not going to change anything, not even a little bit.
One of the main reasons I got into open source software is because I didn’t like the idea that newer versions of software could cost anything.
Why invest time in learning Photoshop when this version costs $600 but the next version may cost $3,000.
Some might say, just keep using the version you already bought. What happens when you can’t buy a computer that comes with an OS that your version is compatible with?
Microsoft saying, “We won’t sue users of Moonlight 2.0”, is saying what about 2.0.1, or 2.5, or 4.0?
I read the same comment in SlashDot.
Nobody can predict the future, but right now im glad we have open source implementations, I’ll use them till HTML5 catch ups, it may take a while thougt.
You caught me. I wasn’t stealing though… that was me on there too.
Its a trap. Microsoft doesn’t care about users. Look at IronPython. Microsoft did a ton of work to get great dynamic support in their runtime… but do you see Microsoft shipping any of their development tools with Python support? They’ll make their platform attractive for Python developers, but would never promote Python because people might realize that its portable and can be run on non-Windows machines. Same thing with Moonlight. They won’t sue but they aren’t doing a hell of a lot either. Maybe by paying one guy’s Salary they’re just trying to avoid lawsuits by saying they made an effort. Who knows what their intentions are but we know from experience they can’t be good.
Wow wow wow, cut the paranoia, MS promote dinamycs languajes as python also:
http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Python/
It doesn’t ship with python because they only release it for their oficitial languajes C++, C#, VB and now F#, but languales like python, ruby, chrome (aka pascal), etc. can be integrated also.
And what I can remember, not even python developers give you the tools for python, just a console, you need to get the tools from else where.
DELETED.
Edited 2009-12-18 18:08 UTC
Yep. These would not be users or customers of Microsoft. They would be users and/or distributors of a third party reimplementation of “Microsoft IP”. Like TomTom.
More than that, Microsoft is also saying they won’t sue for Moonlight. If I throw moonlight in a larger project call it Earth-light, then what? Its a derived product, so it would still be covered under gpl, but would MS sue me, and any/all that use it?
Worse yet, what if somehow the word “license” changes its meaning to “small rodent”. The probability of that alone means that Microsoft is trying to ruin the open source community once again.
Why is Microsoft always trying to keep us down!!!!
You could craft professional b2b or b2c websites with just notepad. But development projects require more than the text editor. There are team integration, unit test, specs, workflow, etc, etc…
You may do all this in your text editor. You’ll just spend ages doing it (or learning how to do it all) and other businesses will beat you to it.
I do agree that precise, elegant websites (and more generally softwares) have to be written by very competent programmers who use mainly knowledge and handcraft alot of things. But it has drawbacks.
Terminal, GIT/SVN, Python, Latex.
Some people prefer doing things this way. What I’m saying is that even in 2009, using a text editor is still equal in power to any other way and that this means _equality_. Anybody, in any country, with any tools they can afford can compete on the world stage. Can OSnews not see the importance of that!?
Relevant to nothing, I must interject:
WOOT WOOT LaTeX! And xterm!
Usually faster than IDE’s way of doing stuff.
Let’s be honest, Notepad doesn’t cut it for a large project.
If you compare eclipse with emacs, you probably agree that emacs users are seen as more “pro” than eclipse users; the same applies to vim users. But both emacs and vim are really powerful, more so than an IDE if setup correctly with good plugins. But then you could say both emacs and vim *are* IDEs; the difference is that they require more knowledge on how to operate them, unlike eclipse which is a lot more easier to start with.
I could compete perfectly well with pirated software, like a lot of hungry programmers do out there in the real world. Companies already know that and they won’t even care, because if you are poor today, you pirate their software to build the next big thing, then you’ll get enough money to pay for it in the future. If that wasn’t the case, they would be providing their tools with hardware lock keys to make the life of the poor programmers more misserable, but then they are losing potential customers and also making their platform only accessible to those that can pay.
And rampant piracy creates monopolies with massive, massive drawbacks. Look at the situation in South Korea and China where IE usage is horrendous, with little hope of bringing it down. They are stuck in the Internet we had in 2003.
Fully agreed. My “IDE” has always been four xterms and Emacs. Add version control system and various other tools. I couldn’t imagine anything that an IDE could give me.
And besides, most of the hype is just typical marketing crap. That these new “superior” tools give outstanding boost to “productivity”, etc. Kind of the same thing as with the classical “Taylorism”.
And while I’ve tried something like Visual Studio and agree that it is a fine tool, I still strongly dislike IDEs. Mainly more because of the implicit things these typically seem to imply; a collar around your neck and that kind of drag-and-drop programming. But maybe I shouldn’t dislike IDEs themselves; maybe this is a direct result of badly designed and over-complex APIs that almost every new language seem to carry.
But obviously the bottom line: each to their own, bad carpenter blames his tools, etc.
Edited 2009-12-19 06:49 UTC
Unit testing? SVN is a shockingly poor SCM too.. GIT is a nice theory, till you try to use it with a large team working on common code or interdependent modules. In my experience it’s better to use a locking mechanism in SCM, because it forces methodical thinking and gets developers talking to each other. Non-locking only works in a single developer/widely dispersed scenario. If all the team members are in a single office space, communication works best; locking forces communication.
I predict that whatever you produce will either be unmaintainable by anybody except yourself or will fail to run correctly. I’ve seen this attitude before, usually with fairly novice gung-ho developers. It’s all very well making big statements, but results need to be documented, fully tested and stable. To be honest, any coder worth their salt can code in a plain text editor – the reason many don’t is more to do with the amount of time they save. That is not being lazy, that is being pragmatic.
Any news on whether this works with netflix streaming now? It’s the only place I’ve ever seen silverlight in the wild. And that’s also the only reason I have windows on my netbook.
moonlight will never get silverlight drm
“Dear Microsoft, …”
silverlight drm is going to be windows only
it was the same with wmp for mac before they canceled it
I went and got the new moonlight and went to a couple of siverlight sites and it works great. I am surprised
They have been working hard on it. I say kudos to them for their hard work.
I’ve got nothing fundamentally against the concept of Silverlight or even Flash, my issue is the development of these technologies, compatibility and patents. Both Adobe and Microsoft need to develop a way where third parties can create compatible implementations in the same way in which Java is developed by a committee, a test suite created and certified implementations are able to use the Silverlight branding to ensure compatibility between the various implementations.
Right now, however, Adobe has flat out refused to fully open up flash specifications which make implementing a compatible version all the more difficult. On the other hand Microsoft has Silverlight well documented (due to it being a recent project and having to conform to the new internal standards) but the downside is the issue of patents and transparency with the development process.
Again, I’m not fundamentally against the concept of Flash and Silverlight, the problem I have is the implementation side of it, when it goes off the drawing board and implemented by way of development processes, transparency between the main implementation and third parties.
Mono/Moonlight contains C# code which, as most of us know, is an Microsoft implementation.
LINUX ISN’T Microsoft. SO STOP TRYING TO BE LIKE Microsoft!!
“..and 320000 lines of C# code (125000 lines of code came from Microsoft’s open source Silverlight Controls).”
“..every Linux distributor can ship it without the fear of getting sued by Microsoft over patents. The Mono project worked together with Microsoft to make this happen.”
Microsoft still has the power over the patent. They still have the right to sue whenever they want. And OWN/CONTROL many aspects of the code.
This is CLOSED-SOURCE disguised as OpenSource. This has already given the opensource community(GNU/GPL) a black eye. The inclusion of proprietary code in linux projects WILL come back to bite the Linux community in the ass.
All of these reasons and more, are why I only use GNU/GPL OpenSource code on my network. (NO C# here).
Everyone knows Novell is Microsoft’s lapdog. ;p
To develop with something like this that requires explicit patent grants from a single organisation, and a competitor in Novell’s case, is stir fry crazy. However, some just see what they want to see and you can’t persuade the deluded in any way.
I’d give this post a +1 moderation if the system had allowed me to.
You embrace, you will be extended and extinguished. How many times are people going to fall for this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Halloween_documents_leak
MS even did a very similar trick with WISE and Win32
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/07/18/analysis_how_ms_used/
Even standards mean nothing if you don’t intend to work together.
http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/296
There is no new Microsoft, I don’t doubt some are genuine, but the top isn’t.
You should judge by past actions, so I’m not sure there is anything that MS can do (‘say’ means nothing) that could make me trust them and embrace their technology. Not that I normally like their technology anyway.
The debate in this thread has mostly been about the virtues of HTML5 vs browser plugins (Flash, Silverlight, Moonlight, Java, etc).
That is very refreshing for a Mono/Moonlight article. We usually get the “Mono is evil because it’s MS tech, or a patent trap”.
Microsoft has continued to get more and more open about it’s tech, and it’s become safer and safer to use Mono.
But HTML5, I have to agree with Kroc. I see that as the future, or just the more attractive selection as opposed to the proprietary, resource hogging, patent encumbered plugins.
IMHO the Google is far bigger danger to freedom then silverlight + flash + java + any other plugin.
Wake me up when netflix can play on a mainstream linux distro immediately after installation.