Mono Coders Hack Linux Silverlight in 21 Days

Etrigoth writes "After the recent announcement of Silverlight by Microsoft at their Mix event in Vegas, Miguel de Icaza galvanised his team of developers in the Mono group at Novell to create a Linux implementation, a so-called 'Moonlight'. Remarkably, they achieved this in 21 Days. Although they were first introduced to Silverlight at the Las Vegas Mix, de Icaza was invited by a representative of Microsoft France for a 10 minute demonstration at the Paris Re-Mix 07 keynote conference, should they have anything to show.
Joshua, a blogger for Microsoft has confirmed that the Mono team did not know anything about Silverlight 1.1 before its launch. Other members of this team have blogged about this incredible achievement, Moonlight hack-a-thon. It's worth noting from a developer perspective that Moonlight is not Mono and doesn't require Mono to work"

Wonderful

Is Silverlight a public API or closed? Either way this is great news, as some sites might start utilizing it. Personally I think Adobe beat them to the market by a decade. Flash is already soaked in the mainstream, so it'll be tough for MS to uproot Adobe from that position.

Regardless though, having a native solution is always good.

Re:Wonderful

That, and the whole Dmitry Sklyarov affair.

No, Adobe, we haven't forgotten.

Re:The name

What's wrong with Monopolight?

Re:Wonderful

Go to http://silverlight.net/ [silverlight.net] and click the "Silverlight in action" link on the right hand side. Then tell me that Flash still has them beat ;)

-Rick

Re:Wonderful

Not in Flash 9/CS3/Actionscript 3. It's far faster than previous versions due to the removal of features like variable watching and a new event system, better class system and an entirely redesigned VM. Infact, in my experience, it's of equal speed or faster than managed code as well as easier to hack for.

Re:Wonderful

For one thing, Silverlight supports the VC-1 codec. This would allow embedded HD video which Flash currently can't handle.

Ever since Adobe started using the On2 codec, HD Flash is not a problem. We just shipped several HD clips in Flash for a job and they looked great.

Re:Wonderful

Silverlight supports both progressive download and streaming.

I've been demoing 720p HD streaming to Silverlight at 4 Mbps. It works fine today (and Silverlight 1.0 is still only in public beta).

Re:Wonderful

Go to http://silverlight.net/ [silverlight.net] and click the "Silverlight in action" link on the right hand side. Then tell me that Flash still has them beat ;)

I just watched the video. I saw nothing that Flash couldn't do, much less anything that Shockwave couldn't do.

The reason why Flash is popular isn't because you can create complicated applications with it. (You can, but nobody uses them.) The reason why it's popular is because it's small, fast, and has a very large, cross-platform installed base. Silverlight isn't any of those three.

Re:Wonderful

The real reason that Flash is popular is because that is the standard that YouTube decided on.

And why did YouTube decide on Flash as their standard? Because Flash plugins were mature and reliable, worked well with all leading browsers and OS platforms, and even came pre-installed with many browser distros. Because it allowed them to avoid the game of "Select your poison: Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime?" that users at previous video sites had to play. Because tools for generating and publishing Flash content were not onerously expensive.

Is Silverlight any of these things yet?

Re:Already better tools for Silverlight

...unless you happen to not run Windows, of course. While Windows Media has been shipping for years, I don't really think you have an official distribution of the latest codec for Linux and MacOS - unlike Adobe, who offer Flash 9 for all major platforms. After all, if you want to compete with Flash you have to offer all dependencies from one source; telling users to use Google's reverse engineered code (ie. FFMpeg's WMV3 functionality) doesn't quite cut it unless you can guarantee that FFmpeg is 100.00% compatible. Given that you even have Silverlight for all three major platforms, that is.

This is not supposed to be an "fulfill my unreasonable demands or else!1" flame, but really, Adobe has set a certain standard for interoperability and if Silverlight doesn't live up to that standard it's yet another Windows-only technology that no sane web developer will use because Flash does the same on more platforms. After all, ActiveX has done what Silverlight does now for quite a while, if the user was ready to accept the security issues.


(By the way, a codec developer who uses the term "video experience" to describe a container format/video codec? Microsoft's PR department must make some really good Kool-Aid!)

Re:Wonderful

Ok, before Mono I, as a Linux user, was unable to run applications written in C#. After Mono I, as a Linux user, now have the choice as to whether or not I want to run a C# application. You want me to be mad about that?

Miguel has not taken anything away from Linux, everything he's done has added to the choices we have. I would rather have an open-source implementation of Silverlight for Linux than have no implementation or a closed-source implementation. If you don't like Silverlight, don't install Moonlight, but don't presume to tell me if I should or should not use it.

If anything, Miguel has just proven that even if Microsoft keeps changing the API, the Mono team can keep up.

Re:Wonderful

Go to http://silverlight.net/ [silverlight.net] and click the "Silverlight in action" link on the right hand side. Then tell me that Flash still has them beat ;)

Bit of a problem here, see... I can't watch this video because it's a shitty proprietary Microsoft video format, and I'm on Linux. If they really wanted to advertise Silverlight in a portable manner, I'd recommend a Flash video.

Oh the irony...

Re:Wonderful

All they have to do is yank iexplore32 and flash dies overnight.

At which point every federal prosecutor and his brother will be jumping at the chance to head up the anti-trust suit -- never mind how quickly MS would be bitch-slapped in Europe.

Re:Wonderful

That depends, if it were demonstrated to have been yanked to stifle the competition, then yes it could be an antitrust problem. If they yanked it because it was a huge security nightmare, and they were going to release a new more secure browser, then probably not.

But that being said, Apple hasn't been bitchslapped or even investigated for the charges I read about from time to time, about early on how Jobs manufactured an iPod shortage to enrich Apple's margins. That kind of amazes me, because I'll read about that from time to time in articles that praise Jobs performance since he got back. I suspect that if that and the mandatory minimum pricing on the iPods isn't considered to be fodder for antitrust suits, I doubt that MS should be smacked for removing an insecure browser from the market. Even if it does harm the competition or consumer.

Re:Closer to the subject than anti-trust.

I think that Garfield has gone way down hill since Nermal first appeared.

Re:Wonderful

You don't seem to understand what "antitrust" means -- and unfortunately, you're not alone in this here on Slashdot. It seems lots of people think "antitrust" means any sort of subjectively "unfair" market manipulation, but that's not what it means. Antitrust law, broadly speaking, has to do with monopolies that are unfairly leveraged, with oligopolies that collude to set prices, and with mergers and acquisitions that consolidate the only major players in a market into one, dominant player.

First off, despite what you may have heard, in the US at least, monopolies are not illegal. If by fair competition you become the only player on the block, you are not subject to antitrust law. If, however, you use your monopoly position to create barriers to entry into the market (other than the natural barriers caused by competition) or if you use your monopoly in one market to unfairly compete in another market, you may be subject to antitrust law.

With regards to Apple -- and for the record, I am not a fanboy, I don't own an iPod and I run Debian on my Thinkpad -- there is very little evidence that they have a monopoly anywhere at all. First: the iPod is not a monopoly. This seems to be very difficult for some Slashdotters to grasp. Yes, it is by far and away the most popular digital music player on the market today, but it is not the only one. And it isn't like the only alternative is Microsoft's Zune or some other non-profitable offering subsidized by a powerful company trying to break into the market, either. There are literally thousands of competitive offerings, with the same feature set as the iPod, many of them technically superior in pretty much every way to the iPod, that are cheaper to boot. People in the US don't seem to buy them much, but they most certainly are available. The barriers to entry in the digital music player market are extremely low, and there is nothing whatsoever about Apple's dominance that changes that. Companies like Creative, iRiver, and countless other small no-name brands from China manage to remain profitable, although their volumes are somewhat lower than Apple's. But hey, newsflash: most markets have a dominant player. That doesn't mean the dominant player has a monopoly, and even if it they did, it doesn't mean they obtained that monopoly unfairly or that they're abusing their monopoly to fix prices.

The only semi-possible charge related to antitrust law that has ever been levied against Apple is with regards to their Fairplay DRM, which is only available on the iPod, and which allegedly causes vendor lock-in. Well, there's a big reason that no one ever pursues this: it's a non-starter. Many competing music players play AAC without DRM these days, and according to Apple's own data, the overwhelming majority of music on people's iPods does not come from the iTunes music store, which is pretty much the only place that you might get AAC + Fairplay tracks. Unless you put DRM on your own tracks -- and who does that -- most music is still ripped from people's own CD collection or obtained illegally via P2P or similar.

These complaints about Fairplay also ignore the glaringly obvious: pretty much any proprietary software package also has proprietary file formats, many of which are deliberately obfuscated, precisely in order to lock users into their products. Reading Microsoft hackers' own experiences reverse engineering the WordPerfect document formats back when that product was dominant is extremely illustrative in this regard. (The fact that I'm pointing out that this is standard industry practice should not in any way be construed as support for said practice; I am in favor of open document formats precisely because I disagree with vendor lock-in. But the fact remains: this sort of thing, by itself, is not an antitrust violation.)

In fact, my iRiver (which I purchased because it supports Ogg Vorbis and love) supports some DRM-laden format of its own, IRM or somesuch, which

Re:Wonderful

every federal prosecutor and his brother will be jumping at the chance to head up the anti-trust suit

Yes, since that worked so well the last time...

Court: "Microsoft, you've been found guilty of anti-competitive and monopolistic practices. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Microsoft looks at the floor, hands in pockets, mumbles "Sorry...."
Court: "Well, don't let it happen again!"

Re:Wonderful

>All they have to do is yank iexplore32 and flash dies overnight.

All they have to do is yank iexplore32 and Firefox wins overnight.

There, fixed that for you.

The MS teams

must be pissed. How do they look when a bunch of coders implement in three weeks what they worked on for months? Surely the quality is not the same and the Mono guys still have a lot to do but damn, this is fast!

Re:The MS teams

Silverlight 1.1 is a stripped down version of the .Net framework 3.0. They took the 25+meg 3.0 library and started trimming out namespaces until they got down to a 4 meg library that could be run as a browser plug-in. So while their work is commendable, the hard part (the .Net libraries) was already done as part of the existing Mono project. I imagine the most time consuming part was determining exactly which namespaces Microsoft left in.

-Rick

Re:No Mono in Moonlight

Moonlight does not use Mono or .Net or C# or anything like that. It's written in C++ and can be used as a Firefox plugin directly. Read all the links at the top of the Slashdot story.

Correct, it does not need or use Mono because it IS Mono. It is a stripped down version of Mono. Mono is coded in C++, thus Moonlight is coded in C++.

-Rick

Re:No Mono in Moonlight

Mono is not coded in C++, it is coded in C.

The Moonlight rendering engine is written in C++, this is the piece that can be used without Mono, although for most things you will want Mono.

The binding to link the engine to Mono is written in C#.

Re:The MS teams

Meh, IIRC Mono hasn't even completed the port of .Net 2.0 (especially the ASP.NET part), let alone .Net 3.0. So they had to implement whatever .Net 3.0 libraries Silverlight may have needed.

You do not remember correctly, and in particular the ASP.NET 2.0 piece is incorrect. We are in fact not done with 100% of .NET 2.0, but we got pretty much all the APIs that people are using according to the 2,000 or so reports that we are getting through our Migration Tool. There is still work left to do, but we are on good track. ASP.NET 2.0 is complete, it is so complete that Mainsoft already shipped their Grasshopper product (whose ASP.NET 2.0 support is the same Mono code base). We have not shipped because we are going to ship other technologies like Windows forms that Grasshopper is not targeting. Miguel.

Why?!

This will give MS more of a foothold in the market. They wanted this to happen! Now flash isn't the only cross platform game in town so now the marketing guys will be able to say YES IT WILL WORK ON LINUX so you dont just need to use flash!

Re:Why?!

This will give MS more of a foothold in the market. They wanted this to happen! Now flash isn't the only cross platform game in town so now the marketing guys will be able to say YES IT WILL WORK ON LINUX so you dont just need to use flash!

Previously I was worried that any OSS support for Silverlight would just be giving MS an edge. But now I see it quite differently. One problem with Flash (in my opinion) is that there is no full open-source implementation. Some people may say "who cares?" since there are free (but not Free) flash players for every major OS (including Linux). But to me, those closed-sourced players are not so great, and I wish an open-source player (and development environment) existed.

But the problem with creating a FOSS version of Flash is that it's a matter of catch-up. With Silverlight, this team of coders is showing that they can keep up. Thus, instead of being behind in their implementation, they are showing that they can always deliver a feature-complete alternate (and FOSS) implementation.

Frankly I hope this displaces flash to some extent. Even if it gives MS's platform more exposure, it won't matter as long as there is also a feature-complete FOSS implementation. Creating marketplace competition is always good... and in this case we have competition to MS's Silverlight, and competition to Flash. This is good. I highly doubt that Microsoft expected or wanted this to happen. In fact, nothing could be worse for their longterm goals than for a FOSS equivalent to be as good (or maybe better?) than their implementation. Having a competing implementation, used by many people, will mean that they cannot "embrace and extend" and cannot lock people into their products. After all, if they try to change the Silverlight standard, who is to say whether the MS implementation or the FOSS implementation will become the defacto standard?

Re:Why?!

Please get over yourself. Flash is at best a semi-open standard with severely lacking open source implementations. If an open standard with a complete open source implementation replaces Flash then there is little reason to care who created the standard in the first place apart from blind zealotry.

Re:Why?!

swf is an open format so THAT obviously isn't the problem...

From http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/ [adobe.com]
"This license does not permit the usage of the specification to create software which supports SWF file playback."

It's a bit like having a research library that permits you access to any book you want, as long as your paper doesn't cite one as a reference.

"Miguel de Icaza" account is an imposter

In this message [slashdot.org], the real Miguel ("Miguel" (7116) [slashdot.org]) said:

The `Miguel de Icaza' account is an impersonator, I do not know who it is. And his views have nothing to do with mine.
This is a shame, because that person has been flaming everywhere.
The slashdot admins have said that they can not do anything about it.

May I be the first...

... to congratulate Miguel and his team for this remarkable achievement!

Gives an insight into what Open Source is capable of.

Y

Re:May I be the first...

What Open Source is capable of?

Would Miguel's team not have been able to code this under a closed license? Was there significant public involvement that was critical to the project?

Also, what was accomplished? A 100% direct rip-off of a product already created and demonstrated by a closed-source development house? Impressive. Wow.

ha!

fast! you call this FAST? most MS-software is developed in a view minutes!!!11!1ONE

(at least it runs like as if... *SCNR*)

ah, the free linux version of silverlight

Right, so MS had promised from the start that Silverlight would have a Linux version.
I just didn't realize they had been planning on achieving that goal by getting a bunch of OSS coders to do all their work for them for free.
Oh well, probably better this way, since it might remain capital-F Free. What's the Moonlight license, anyway?
If this _is_ a "FREE" implementation of Silverlight it really will start to look like a nicer alternative to the poorly-supported, closed-source Flash for Linux.

Re:ah, the free linux version of silverlight

That said.. it occurred to me that, just like any other "standard" supported by a company, one has to be careful in employing it and depending on it. MS could easily make incompatible changes at any time in the future to the Windows implementation, creating a non-stop game of tag for the Moonlight developers. Remember what MS did to HTML? It will be even easier to "embrace and extend" for MS on their _own_ standard. It would be much better if there were an open standard for this sort of media. SVG comes close, but I have yet to see a fast, dependable, and standardized implementation, and Flash, unlike SVG, supports much more than just vector graphics.

Cool, but ultimately pointless

Ok, they might develop thousand times faster than Microsoft. Unfortunately it is and always will be Microsoft leading the way, Mono & Co lagging behind. Nothing will change that.

Re:Cool, but ultimately pointless

Considering that mono and friends is a project at delivering an open-source, Linux-compatible implementation of .NET, I completely fail to see how they could get ahead. Unless they have a time machine hidden somewhere... It's like complaining that German translation of books written in English are always released after the English versions.

Re:Cool, but ultimately pointless

Unfortunately it is and always will be Microsoft leading the way, Mono & Co lagging behind. Nothing will change that.

Of course "Mono & Co" will always be lagging behind.. What, you expect the re-implementation to come before the original? Regardless, is a lag of 21 days really a dealbreaker here? You didn't buy Vista the day it was released did you? Lighten up on the blanket defeatism, sheesh. It's not War and Peace.

Well, certainly at the core of what Silverlight can do, we are following Microsoft direction, but we have already taken Silverlight in new directions, for example we are able to use it to extend Gtk# applications and to create desklets. Both things that were not initially supported by Silverlight.

What is Silverlight?

What the heck is Silverlight?

Okay, Silverlight is a Microsoft product [microsoft.com], and is some kind of plug-in related to "media experiences and rich interactive applications for the web", according to the above page. Not finding that especially enlightening, I clicked on the FAQ [microsoft.com], where the first question is "What is Silverlight?" [microsoft.com]. Great! Unfortunately it yielded a "We're sorry, the page you requested could not be found" error. Maybe I need Javascript turned on or something? Ah. There we go. [Shrug] Huh? Same terse verbiage-filled useless description as before. Thanks for nothing. Other information on the FAQ page imply streaming of content using "Windows Streaming is another major goal of the product, complete with fancy DRM [weak Golf clapping].

So, I'm still not 100% sure, but I think it's trying to emulate the typical user experience with Flash, including the ungraceful handling of missing/disabled browser features :-)

Oh. I did find out that the Microsoft definition of "cross-platform" is Windows (versions unspecified) and Mac OS X 10.4.8+ (Intel and PPC), but they say they are considering wider support.

Favorite buzzword phrase: "free cloud-based hosting and streaming solution".

Cloud-based? I haven't heard that one before.

Re:What is Silverlight?

Favorite buzzword phrase: "free cloud-based hosting and streaming solution".

Cloud-based? I haven't heard that one before.

Vapourware.