Posts by moyashi

Open-source Silverlight slips into second gear

@jeremy

Jeremy,

You very well may have more/better info than me - I certainly don't follow all de Icaza's activities. What I meant by "higher level" was a (perhaps naive) intuition that his guiding philosophies are about encouraging interoperability on many levels and accruing power and ease of use - by any means necessary - for unix-like operating systems. My take on him was that he is immensely practical and not ideological. Of course, I could be wrong. My link to Hoffman's post was intended to ally fears; the way I see it, if MS wants to focus on Silverlight as the UI for their cloud apps and doesn't in fact care much about trying to beat Flash at its own game, then, in a sense, we can stop worrying about Silverlight! This because I see it getting restricted to their insular (and therefore doomed) attempt to capitalize on "the cloud."

About de Icaza and about Silverlight

1. Miguel de Icaza is one of the originators and lead developers of the Gnome desktop, so calling him "...the worst thing to happen to open source software ever" is a patent absurdity. This guy operates at a much higher level than you may realize.

2. I think Kevin Hoffman is really on to something when he predicts that Microsoft plans Silverlight as much, much more than a Flash wannabee. In fact, they may not even care if anyone uses it for workaday web development. What we may be looking at is the internal GUI tool for their next epoch: http://dotnetaddict.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/silverlight2_important.htm

I'm no fan of MS (quite the opposite), but read the post - Kevin's vision seems penetrating.