Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Why endorse an independent project to support it unless you want it to have different capabilities in the "official" version ? MS are I believe playing a balancing game of getting cross platform support working just well enough to get it in use whilst not giving away the capability of making the experience better on their platforms.
Actually, creating their own Linux plugins would have been better for them in this regard; they can ensure they're always "below par" and blame the platform. MS have never been the best software developers on the planet, they always do "just enough". There is a real chance that over time the Moonlight version will perform better than Silverlight, and that's not something MS can now control. Sure Silverlight will always have more features, as the feature set is something MS still have control over, but stability, speed, etc are all areas that Moonlight can potentially do better at.
In the short term, of-course, there's so little Silverlight content that there can't be many developers getting an itch worth scratching. If/when Silverlight becomes mainstream, though...
I can only assume that the reason they haven't is because of the issues mentioned or just general brain-deadness. Interestingly there were supposedly some significant technical hurdles in getting 64bit flash libraries built (at least that was always the excuse for them not being available in the past) so I wonder what state the flash runtime is in..perhaps the reason it isn't open is because they don't want us to see the state of the code and form opinions about their other products :)
This crossed my mind.
But then you have to start looking towards gnash - MS are supporting a FOSS implementation of their plugin, so that ought to encourage Adobe to actually offer some support (and even development effort) to gnash rather than making it difficult for them.