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Microsoft To Open Source Some of Silverlight
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue May 01, 2007 05:02 AM
from the short-on-ideas dept.
from the short-on-ideas dept.
Kurtz writes with word that Microsoft is about to follow in Adobe's footsteps by releasing the source code to part of its Silverlight technology. The news comes less than a week after Adobe announced plans to open source the Flex SDK. Microsoft is hungry to build the developer base for its rich Internet app tools, if it can.
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Adobe Open Sources Flex SDK Under MPL 134 comments
andy_from_nc writes "Adobe announced that they are open sourcing their Flex SDK under the Mozilla Public License incrementally by December. This move comes on the heels of Microsoft's announcement of their Silverlight and Adobe's CEO's criticism of it. Adobe's action will likely please other open source developers who use Flex, like me, and offers hope that we'll see a full open source version of Flash one day. You can read Adobe's FAQ on the move as well."
[+]
Microsoft Common Language Runtime To Be Cross-Platform 308 comments
axlrosen alerts us to a Microsoft sleeper announcement from Mix07: a version of its Common Language Runtime will be available cross-platform. The Core CLR shows up as part of the Silverlight SDK that Redmond is open sourcing. From the blog posting: "The biggest Mix '07 announcement made on opening day of this week's show was one that Microsoft didn't call out in any of its own press releases: Microsoft is making a version of its Common Language Runtime available cross-platform. The CLR is the heart of Microsoft's .Net Framework programming model. So, by association, the .Net Framework isn't just for Windows any more."
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Ohhhhh Sources (Score:5, Insightful)
So RTFA - but none of it's official, there are no details other then a little about the market space. In fact I suspect the discussion on Slashdot will be more interesting.
Re:Ohhhhh Sources (Score:5, Informative)
Read this article http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2123859,00.as p [eweek.com] as it's a bit more interesting. The open source bits are the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and the IronPython language. The DLR sits on top of .NET, so if you are using Mono and IronPython, then I would assume that you would then have all the source from top to bottom.
The MS stuff is here http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython [codeplex.com]
This time I even checked my links :-)
Parent
Re:Ohhhhh Sources (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ohhhhh Sources (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think you can aquire an open source project. Your comment is a bit misleading. Rather what happened was that the sole developer Jim Hugunin wanted to join Microsoft after meeting with the .NET CLR (Common Language Runtime) team while discussing with them the technical issues he encountered. Jim joined up, and with a team at MS, brought IronPython to it's 1.0 release in September 2006.
There's some history on Jim Hugunin's blog here http://blogs.msdn.com/hugunin/archive/2006/09/05/7 41605.aspx [msdn.com]
There's other Python projects for you purists to get your teeth stuck into, but this one isn't one of them, as it is with a lot of .NET stuff. Here, try Jim Hugunin's JVM based Python called Jython http://www.jython.org/ [jython.org]
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Easily. You can acquire my open source project, Stylus Toolbox [sf.net]. Pay me USD $5,000, and I will transfer the copyright to you. All of the code is contributed by me, so no copyright issues. Then, you can take and release under whatever license you want, provided you remove the dependency on GladeWindow.py, which is GPL and not written by me. All other dependencies are either LGPL or Python license, or are dependencies on applications that are called, not linked,
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The companies involved in this shit include: IBM, Sun, Apple...
Wow, I'm not sure how you fault Apple in this regard. They actually shipped TPM enabled machines for some time, but never used the TPM in their OS or software, only opening it up for developers interested in doing encryption with it and eventually dropping it due to lack of interest. They did implement EFI, but there is no indication of using it for trusted computing either only for a modern replacement to BIOS.
Always late... (Score:5, Interesting)
Finish what you started (Score:3, Funny)
Silverlight In Action (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Being an unfan of Flash anyways makes me not really care what MSFT is doing to hurt/help that market. But it's sad to know that MSFT just will never change.
Oh well.
Tom
Re:Silverlight In Action (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
here's a preview (Score:4, Funny)
main() { if(running_on_linux()) { crash(horribly, messily); } return proprietary_blob(patented); }
Scott Guthrie on Silverlight (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
The PR people will then jump around saying Microsoft==open!!!eleven!. Do you see?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Some of us hate flash - small tip if you don't have a T1 connection and things are slow Block flash and the internet really speeds up.
If people wish to develop sites that we cant view (think scfi channel) or adverts in it then its not a problem here as we associate flash with rubbish/spam.
Also a defacto standard is not if no 'upto' date linux plugin is available. It is possible to live without flash, and yes the world is a better place.
Flash (and wannabe ompetitors)is a childrens program whether the
Re:Really. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, Adobe released Flash Player 9 for Linux last October... I'm not sure what more you want. They now have Flash Player for Solaris, too. Obviously it exists for Windows and OSX, as well. Yes, Flash can be abused... but Flash can also be really useful for creating engaging user experiences and it's also an EXCELLENT platform for application development, particularly via Flex. Flex 2 is great, Actionscript 3 is a really nice language featuring the best of OO and dynamic languages, the AVM2 virtual machine is a really nice piece of work. I know more and more enterprise developers who do .NET or Java that have been exposed to Flex 2 in recent months and come to like it very quickly. The power that it affords is great, it "just works" (regardless of browser/OS), and it's infinitely better to develop apps of all kinds in than HTML/CSS/Javascript.
So I'm sorry that you have such issues with Flash. But as a development platform, it's appealing in many ways. And ever since the Adobe/Macromedia merger, Adobe has really become more open with their developers and has been releasing more and more tools to help them out (checkout labs.adobe.com for some examples).
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Really. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think if Adobe invested more in Flash, and specifically getting more developers into Flash, they'd have a solid niche. But they've made Flash development more difficult to get into than it needs to be, and I think that based on that alone you can predict that Silverlight will probably fight a downhill battle and win over Flash.
Parent
Re:Really. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Linux/OSX support it"
Does it? Aside from the fact that it cannot be offered with the OS because of license restrictions, I have heard of many people having problems running Flash on Linux. What we really need is something like this that uses entirely open standards so third party players can be developed (not sure if MS will agree to do that for Silverlight, though).
From what I have heard, the main advantage to Silverlight is that it integrates better with .NET applications on the server-side. Besides, how can a little bit of competition be a bad thing? Worst case it will force Adobe to improve their product in order to keep from losing out to Silverlight. If you were to argue we don't need new technologies when there is already something that is "good enough", we should all be running applets in Netscape.
Parent
Re:Really. (Score:5, Insightful)
* MS Core fonts for the web
* IE for Mac / UNIX
* Windows Media Player for Mac
Microsoft's idea of cross platform is do it till its popular and then EOL everything but Windows. The only reason they're doing this at all is that Flash video is killing WMV.
Parent
Re:Auto-print (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Microsoft has open-sourced a lot of stuff... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are several reasons people may be interested in open source, but they all have one thing in common
Open-sourcing *part* of a product, when you're potentially going to have to pay Microsoft to use the rest (the price I read was the first million users free, then 25 cents per user after that), is a pretty obvious poison pill.
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