back to article Microsoft's Silverlight gets Linux treatment

An open source version of Microsoft's potential Adobe Flash challenger, Silverlight, has been developed within two months of being unveiled as a beta. Miguel de Icaza and a team of dedicated open source coders have hacked together an implementation of Silverlight they are calling Moonlight, for Linux and Unix. De Icaza came …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Second again

    Second with disk compression,

    second with windows,

    second with browsers,

    now, second with 'flash'

    AND their second venture into linux.

    Now THAT'S what I call innovation.

  2. Dann

    Typo

    4th line down.

    Sliverlight - lol

    Don't forget sysadmin day on 27th July

  3. Morely Dotes

    Let's see... A Microsoft "competitor" for Adobe's crapware...

    Silverlight... Flash... Who frackin' cares? They're both proprietary, both trash, and both serve a single purpose - filling the coffers of greedy bastards who fliut standards and try to push their own shite on the Internet.

  4. Anthony

    Also, Friefox support a definite plus

    Although, to be honest, I hadn't heard of this particular branch of the Mozilla project ;)

    (this is what you get for adding comment pages, El Reg. Although, it could cut down on your editorial budget!)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Title

    Copy-editing for the Web 2.0 generation.

    Thanks for the catches.

    Drew

    El Reg

  6. Matt

    Since when?

    Was C# a non-microsoft language?

    Just because they passed it out for ECMA approval doen't stop it being theirs.

    Forget the typos as being bad journalism and editting, lets get the actual facts of a story straight first please?

  7. Karl Lattimer

    Clarify some points to the public

    @Morely Dotes: You didn't even read the article did you? To quote you "They're both proprietary", erm... moonlight isn't, its open source and free, and cross platform. Read before you comment your ignorance read first, this is intended to kick the proprietary butt of microsoft.

    @Anthony: to quote "I hadn't heard of this particular branch of the Mozilla project ;)", This is nothing to do with Mozilla, its from Novell's mono project of which Miguel is the shining example of how to reinvent the wheel without needing to buy the car :)

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Title

    "Miguel de Icaza and a team of dedicated open source coders have hacked together an implementation of Silverlight they are calling Moonlight, for Linux and Unix."

    Hmm. I hope it's 'hacked together' slightly better than Mono was ... talk about a missed opportunity.

    Personally, I'll be giving it a miss - OpenLaszlo (www.openlaszlo.org) does the job just as well for me even if it does lack the feature-set of whatever the latest Web 2.0 plaything is.

  9. Mark Rendle

    Suggestion

    On the subject of comment pages, could the system not automatically add a "Microsoft are rubbish" comment to any article even vaguely linked with the company? It could save an awful lot of boring morons an awful lot of time.

  10. Patrick O'Reilly

    Browser Support

    Once again Mircosoft is letting down more potential users.

    Why do we developers always end up forgetting about Opera. I mean if they are aiming to write code that is standards compliant then they should be aiming to have their content apearing perfect in Opera.

    Maybe the same hack for using Flash in Opera on Gnu/Linux could be used for Moonlight. (aka copy the plugin into the plugins folder)

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    New Project: Silverlight blocker for Firefox

    I look forward to the quick introduction of a Silverlight blocker add-on for Firefox , rather than being forced to watch even more useless animations on web pages

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: Clarify some points to the public

    Karl, you should really read the comments (and their titles) before jumping in with both feet!

    Morely Dotes was refering to SilverLight and Flash as both being proprietory, and Anthony was being amusing about a typo. Lighten up, man, it's Friday and I didn't get blown up by a bomb :-)

    Chris

  13. Richard Kay

    First

    "Second with disk compression, second with windows, second with browsers,"

    Um not if Linux is seen as a continuation of Unix. I was using X-Windows on Unix around 1986, long before Gates cloned the Apple Mac clone of X.

    Most Windows/MSDOS users abandoned disk compression after they tried it and discovered how much harder it was to recover data after an error disabled their filesystem. Microsoft didn't invent this, they violated Stac Electronic's patents to catch up with DR-DOS which had filesystem compression first, and Microsoft had to pay to settle this one with Stac later. Linux wasn't second with disk compression - this idea just never caught on perhaps because Linux users value the integrity of their data more. Besides, Linux has less need for this if you compare the sizes of files created by typical applications.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS#Legal_issues

    The web was developed with a browser and servers on NeXTSTEP in 1991 and the first browser to combine text and graphics in the same window, NCSA Mosaic was developed on Unix and released in 1993 prior to the Windows port.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29

    It seems that someone needs to study his computing history. Zero marks if you were one of my students.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    re: First

    Linix is not a continuation of UNIX. Linux is NOT UNIX, otherwise SCO would be laughing their asses off right about now, rather than near bankrupt.

    Apple's GUI was a copy of / clone of / inspired by the Xerox PARC desktop, run on the Xerox Alto machine, not X

    1986 is not long before Windows, v1 of Windows was released in 1985 and v2 was released in 1987. They weren't that brilliant at the time, but at least you didn't have to have a massively expensive UNIX workstation to run them.

    Most DOS users abandonded disk compression when the prices of hard drives fell. Data recovery isn't that much harder with a compressed disk, although the impact of a disk/image file corruption is far higher (typically you have to recover everything on the compressed volume's host file.)

    Other than that, top marks on your computer history lesson.

  15. Giles Jones Gold badge

    Amiga had a GUI in 1985

    The Commodore Amiga 1000 was released in 1985 and had a GUI as well as pre-emptive multitasking.

    Both of you need a history lesson.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga

  16. Tone

    Xerox PARC

    Glad someone corrected OP..

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is De lcaza the one he claims to be

    De lcaza is spending a lot of his lifetime on porting the windows apps to linux/unix/whatever, and there's a serious reason why he's doing that. Although I can't prove it, and will never prove, but I'm sure he's getting direct support from MS for doing that, be it money or anything else.

    MS has now another good reason to say that Linux is infringing on its patents.

    I hope Silverlight will have a slow death just as the MS version of Java had.

    MS hates interoperability, but most notably fear Linux: they claim Linux is too unimportant to create a Silverlight version for it, but it's the ONLY OS they are bulling and fighting on their 'get the FUD' page.

    www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/default.mspx

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