Oops, I wasn't reading plug yesterday so I missed this thread until today. I thought I should clarify a few things regarding Moonlight.
Disclaimer: I work for Novell on Moonlight but my comments have some potential to be wrong and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer. As I'm replying to little bits here and there in this thread I won't quote people (I'm too lazy). Silverlight is also better because: It's a DOM-based graphics model that can even be accessed from outside plugin (javascript) or be generated dynamically by any web service. You can program for it in any .NET-supported language (yeah, probably even fortran if you're into that). That's SL 2.0 profile only, the 1.0 profile is javascript-only. Mono is orders of magnitude faster than JavaScript. Tamarin may help that some. There's this cool Silverlight demo where you can play the same chess algorithm against itself, one in JS and the other in .NET. .NET is around 100 times faster (and always wins). I'm sure there are many factors involved there but it's enough of a difference to impress anyway. Early adopters have reported things like that they were able to re-implement their flash apps that took a year to develop in a week or so. In answer to some other questions or statements: LGPL (not GPL) with copyright assignment (like MySQL) so that Novell has the option to re-license the code for situations where LGPL doesn't work for a customer. This does not mean that we hold back any code. We can't un-license it from LGPL. It just means that if a game developer (for instance) wants to sell a proprietary game with moonlight embedded in it for some reason we can work out a deal with them. Doesn't run on PPC, Mips, or SPARC right this minute (actually I don't know, go try it) but there should be no reason why it couldn't and since SuSE still builds distros on those platforms it's probably inevitable that it will. Novell isn't going to do any work for Moonlight on MacOS because MS already provides a silverlight plugin for Mac but you're welcome to port it if that interests you and we will accept good patches. MonoDevelop is probably not as nice as Visual Studio and LunarEclipse (our Moonlight designer) is not a high priority for us at the moment as we expect most Silverlight apps to be written on Windows anyway. On the other hand I think we have a GSOC student working on it so maybe it will become usable this summer. Novell will provide Moonlight plugins for FF2 and FF3 that will be compatible with supported versions (meaning not end-of-life) of major linux distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, [open]SuSE, probably RedHat) on i586 and x86_64. Microsoft will provide media codecs for formats supported by SL for use in the browser plugin Novell provides. These plugins will not be usable for other purposes but it wouldn't be impossible for someone (probably not Novell) to write a XUL application that contained a simple Moonlight media player. It will also be possible to compile Moonlight against ffmpeg (and some day maybe gstreamer) if you can't stand to use binary blobs. Patent covenants may not apply to you in this situation though. Novell can't help that, we're not the ones that wrote the terms of the covenant. Mono is deemed a risky technology primarily by people who are emotionally invested in hating Microsoft. MS has an interest in the dominance of .NET on any operating system. They are learning to accept that Linux is not going away. Some of you think Novell (or perhaps Miguel de Icaza) is evil for flirting with the devil, so to speak. The truth (as I see it) is that Novell is helping MS become more friendly and more comfortable with open source in an economy that requires MS to change the way it does business. Novell has been an influence in having MS licensing large portions of it's code in a OSI-approved license (Ms-PL) and publishing specs (most with patent covenants) for a lot of their proprietary formats and protocols like the legacy Office formats, the MMS protocol, the ASF stream format, and the formula specs for the OOXML spreadsheet format (initially omitted from the ISO proposal). Microsoft is a big company. Some parts of that company are still anti-open-source but many parts of the company are already pro-open-source (particularly the Silverlight and ASP.NET folks). Novell has a good working relationship with Microsoft and a vested interest in making sure that dominant (for whatever reason) protocols and file formats work well on Linux. We're working hard to make sure that the Flash and Office fiascos don't repeat themselves for Linux in the future. There are legal details that complicate and limit what Novell can do. Microsoft is cautious about the process of opening up but the general trend is toward a more open-source-friendly Microsoft. Novell is a big part of making that happen. That's my take on it. As stated above my comments don't necessarily reflect the position of my employer. This post ended up being a lot longer than I meant it to be. I hope it's not taken as inflammatory. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
