Mark Rogers wrote:
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,
It's not about competing with Flash because there is no direct revenue to be gained from that, it's another way to make the web experience slightly more complete on a Windows Machine over the competition. Hence why "proper" Silverlight is currently only available on MS platforms (and OSX) and the OSS Moonlight for other platforms is feature incomplete. They do know that in order to displace flash they need to offer "something" for Linux but this doesn't really display any level of acceptance I can see in a positive light.
Rest assured that at some point full Silverlight availability will be used to leverage market share of either MS platforms or IE itself, this is the only point of it's existence otherwise what does all this effort net Microsoft ?
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
Office for Mac is still going, 2008 was released, 2010 has been announced (now finally with a real Outlook client rather than entourage) IE was dropped if I remember correctly in response to an agreement between MS and Apple that MS would release Mac versions of IE for as long as Apple didn't produce a competing product. Safari appeared and was made available to Windows machines so no more IE.
, 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.
In my opinion this isn't an example of positive acceptance, it is merely phase 2 because ignoring us didn't work. It's a rehash of "this stuff will only work properly on IE/Windows" with a thin varnish of "But look how open we are to interoperability this time, it's not our fault OSS can't keep up"
Moonlight is currently at Silverlight 1.0, Moonlight 2.0 (compatible with Silverlight 2.0) is in pre-release. Silverlight 3.0 was released in July and not currently even on Moonlight's roadmap. So already the OSS version lags the Silverlight spec by 2 releases. Therefore some things will only work properly on genuine Silverlight (several of the things I tried on the MS showcase included) Hence my comment about lip service only. For the full experience you need to be running Windows or intel OSX, I am not sure what Apple did to deserve official releases but I am guessing there was a monopoly clause in there somewhere. Therefore (b) still exists and now it can be spun to be OSS's fault.
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.
I think we need both a official black box build of Silverlight that is at the current spec and a community re-implementation (Moonlight) or as I said if MS were serious about cross platform support with no traps then Silverlight itself would have been open. The latter will never happen because of the reasons stated above.