Microsoft should get serious on Moonlight Adobe Systems' chief financial officer Mark Garrett has said Silverlight is fizzling. Microsoft's director of client platform evangelism Tim Sneath has said it's fizzing. So the RIA war continues. One intriguing element is that both Flash and Silverlight have an open-source aspect. Adobe's efforts include publishing the SWF …
The problem with Moonlight (apart from the patent threat) is that even with it installed many sites that use Silverlight won't display because they look for SILVERLIGHT ONLY.
At the moment Moonlight is Naff all use to man nor beast so why bother with this useless POS at all?
Well (Sigh) we are going to have to because of Microsoft.
Personally, because of the problems I have had with moonlight, I:-
1) don't install it anymore
2) don't visit sites that require it. It is your loss of business
Look Flash was bad enough but has got a lot better recently. I just don't need this extra hasstle.
3) I hate sites which are totally Flash enabled with NO FRIGGING ALTERNATIVE.
They are just as bad as each other...
Lackluster MS support to something running on Linux is expected, methinks. They are doing it solely to use that as argument against anti-trust suits, monopoly accusations, etc. "See, we interoperate and even collaborate", etc. Making it work well would make them redundant up to a point, so why do it?
Although I realize the same could be said of Office for Mac, and yet one there is that works as well (badly) as the Windows version... Docs created on a Windows machine's Office do not always open well in the Mac's Office. And some people complain that OOo has that trouble...
Or for an alternative view, Mono and Moonlight merely increase the variety of Microsoft applications that Linux has to be compatible with, making it easier for MS to say "Here's something Linux just doesn't support.".
Bill Gates once said that the OS is a natural monopoly. That's true in the sense that applications are tied to the lower-level interface, but false in the sense that anyone can implement their own version of that lower-level interface if they know what it is. That's why Unix never became a monopoly. DOS did, because Microsoft never documented it and kept adding stuff, like Windows, so the cloners could never offer 100% support.
However, as the years go by, Microsoft are ever more constrained by the need to run customers' applications, for which no-one has the source anymore. Such compatibility concerns are the main reason why we had such a long gap between XP and Vista. MS tried to innovate, but nothing ran on the new system, and by the time they'd got everything running they had re-created the old system again. Even where MS have broken new ground, in purely cosmetic matters, most customers seem to prefer what they are used to. (And as long as the idiot who invented the ribbon is in charge of the whole desktop, that's likely to continue.)
Over the same period, the free software movement has been catching up. Cross-platform apps like Firefox and Open Office are actually used by choice on Windows. Many Windows applications run on WINE, for cases where no native Linux equivalent exists. Linux has basically "won" on the server platform and Vista has definitely "lost" on the netbook platform. It's never been easier to dump Windows. MS live on largely because no-one supports ActiveX-crud-on-IE6 like they do, and most games are of such low quality that they are barely portable even to their original target platform, let alone any other.
Cross-platform apps *are* the key. I just don't see that the target platform (native or CLR) makes any difference to portability. MS will ensure that their CLR code doesn't quite run on Mono, just as everyone else will make sure their x86 code *does* run on Windows.
to help make anything run as slickly on Linux as it does under Windows ? A broken implementation on Linux will drive more casual punters back to Windows.
@Simpson
"Cross platform C# applications running on Linux boxes infected with Mono, will ultimately lead to the destruction of MS as we know it."
...and then you woke up. Seriously - there are some cracking Linux distros out there and some cracking native applications. But still, there hasn't been a huge uptake of Linux on the desktop at home. Why might this be ?
What the public wants from a PC is just a box which lets you:
• play games (cracked or bought)
• use the 'famous' applications (cracked or bought)
• surf the Web (without certain sites appearing broken)
• watch Flash content (video and SWF)
• run the standard messaging clients, perhaps with webcams
• run a BitTorrent client
• burn CDs and DVDs with the resultant torrent download or
• run the iTunes software to upload it to their iPods
If any one of these functions is an important one to them and it's 'broken' on Linux, yet works fine under Windows, you're going to have to offer a very good explanation as to why they should persevere with a free (as in beer) OS. It's going to look like it costs nothing because it's crap for everyday use and can only be used by geeks.
I use Ubuntu most of the time but there's still an awful lot of stuff that I can only do in Windows.
> The focus is currently on multimedia and games, but it will also be an alternative to Java for cross-platform mobile applications.
And this is the issue: while both flash and silver/moonlight look pretty, they simply aren't needed for business applications. Business does boring things like forms and database lookups which html+backend-process handles ok. If you want, you can easily get a java terminal client as front-end to your custom back-end app.
If you want to impress the PR people and the users aren't consulted, flash and *light is the way to go. Otherwise just use html or (at worst) java. Stop trying to feed non-web blobs to browsers.
Mono has all the makings of a patent trap by a company who has shown willingness for these kinds of tactics so why on earth would the people at Gnome allow it to become an integral part of their DE?
Moonlight is the first taste of crack "You can see pretty pictures" (just like you can now w Flash) but you can refuse it if you think that its a bad idea and too high a risk to take. Its stupid, dangerous and wrong (not to mention doomed to be always behind and at the mercy) but its a choice.
But installing Mono in every Gnome system to run Evolution, Tomboy and some others, is insane.
Depending on something so potentially hazardous at that level is negligent.
Of course, we have the apologists saying that many things in Linux could be potentially litigious, which is total bull..
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