Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Srdjan Todorovic wrote:
Besides, it's in Microsoft's best interest to move people away from Adobe Flash
The "other platform" support provided in Moonlight just seems to be lip service. Based on my experiences so far I can't imagine it will ever be a feature complete, properly debugged version for version equivalent of the windows build so why take it seriously ?
That depends on how you look at what happens when I load a page that doesn't work using FF on Linux. I see three choices:
(a) I assume Silverlight is crap (b) I assume Linux is crap (c) I assume the website is crap
Now given that I'm a Linux user, it's not likely to be (b), but until recently Microsoft seem to have counted on this. (Whether or not it's (a) or (c) will largely depend on how often it happens on different sites.)
What is interesting for me is that Microsoft no longer discount Linux as being irrelevant; they know that for Silverlight to compete with Flash then it needs to be cross-platform, and that means accepting that other platforms exist. Now this has happened before (eg IE/Office for the Mac) and has been dropped once the technology has been well enough adopted to let cross-platform support go, which is why I'd rather have it developed by a third party and open-source. But it really isn't so long ago that MS would have helped me towards the assumption that (b) above was true, by having a download page for Silverlight that made it clear that I needed a "compatible version of Windows" - and even a "compatible version of IE" - in order to proceed.
If Microsoft were then they would have built a platform independent open source Silverlight and had synchronous releases across all platforms rather than helping Novell re-implement what they have done in a separate project.
Even if MS were serious now, that would not guarantee them being serious in a few years time, so having an open-source option is much preferable. I don't doubt that MS would much rather not *need to* have a Linux version floating around, but that they accept that this is now necessary shows how far we have come.
The next step for Adobe would be to open-source Flash; I don't see what they gain from having a closed-source but free-as-in-beer application unless there are patent issues (eg codecs). Websites aren't the exclusive luxury of PC's any more, and they need to "work" on mobile browsers across a variety of platforms. For anyone to maintain a technology that works across all platforms that way, rather than open-source them, seems crazy to me.