Mark Rogers wrote:
With TV stations and Youtube (etc) streaming video through Flash, I think it's control over content that matters to MS, but equally it could be just that Adobe doing "well"[1] at something doesn't sit well with MS; they're not a big fan of PDFs either I think?
MS don't like PDF's because (horrible adobe implementations aside) it is a true multi-platform and open standard, therefore it does nothing to keep people on their platform.
I remain to be convinced that MS want to control content for it's own sake, at the heart they are still a software giant not a media one so their key interest is leveraging content delivery to make their software the most attractive option.
I'd expect the apps on MS showcase to fail - even to be specifically tweaked to break Moonlight. But are there many real-world Silverlight apps out there that fail in Moonlight? I have no idea, I've only ever found one app at all!
These aren't necessarily apps built by MS though..just featured ones on their site that are supposed to demonstrate the capabilities (ok so therefore probably at the cutting edge of silverlight's capabilities)
I agree Silverlight won't be opened, but that's more because MS just doesn't work that way. they'd have got far further with it (commercially as much as anything else) if they'd open sourced it to start with - that would *really* have wrong-footed Adobe. That's how Google would have played it, but MS is too set in its ways for that.
Exactly and hence why I think there are other reasons for not doing so, open the client runtime and any future competitive advantage of it working better on their platform has gone. 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.
If Silverlight becomes too great a threat, Adobe will doubtless open-source it. Imagine that - if the licence was suitable it could be built-in to browsers like Firefox and that would have to be an effective way to compete with MS!
Yeh Adobe are looking at flash from a very different perspective to MS and Silverlight. Adobe want to leverage flash to sell the developer tools which means they could (codec and 3rd party licensing issues aside) open the client runtime and yes I agree doing this in a way that allowed flash to be built in to OSS platforms would seem like a way to go.
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 :)