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Mono Coders Hack Linux Silverlight in 21 Days

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon Jun 25, 2007 11:55 AM
from the break-out-the-red-bull-and-go-go-go dept.
Novell
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"
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  • Wonderful (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jshriverWVU (810740) on Monday June 25 2007, @11:58AM (#19636817)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Doctor Memory (6336) on Monday June 25 2007, @01:20PM (#19637949) Homepage

          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 (Score:5, Insightful)

            by hedwards (940851) on Monday June 25 2007, @12:31PM (#19637305)
            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:Wonderful (Score:5, Informative)

              by 808140 (808140) on Monday June 25 2007, @04:08PM (#19640155)
              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 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by roscivs (923777) on Monday June 25 2007, @01:07PM (#19637779) Homepage

        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 (Score:5, Insightful)

            by poot_rootbeer (188613) on Monday June 25 2007, @01:35PM (#19638131)
            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:Wonderful (Score:5, Funny)

        by mgiuca (1040724) on Tuesday June 26 2007, @06:59AM (#19647575)

        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 (Score:5, Informative)

            by Divebus (860563) on Monday June 25 2007, @02:55PM (#19639221)

            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 (Score:5, Insightful)

              by mhall119 (1035984) on Monday June 25 2007, @03:48PM (#19639939) Homepage Journal
              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.

  • What is Silverlight? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2007, @12:39PM (#19637389)
    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.

  • What goes around comes around (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jeevesbond (1066726) on Monday June 25 2007, @12:41PM (#19637417) Homepage

    Now that Moonlight is finished Miguel and his team should, having listened to customer demand (I believe that's the excuse Microsoft always uses), build some Free extensions on to Microsoft's work. Meaning the best experience can only be had by people running Moonlight under GNU/Linux and that some functionality will be unavailable to other platforms.

    Gosh, does that mean people will be locked-in to using GNU/Linux? Well Microsoft could use the GPL'ed code if they want to! We'll call it 'Freedom lockin'. :)

    • Re:That's great! (Score:5, Informative)

      by DoctorPepper (92269) on Monday June 25 2007, @12:12PM (#19637003)
      "Microsoft® Silverlight(TM) is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows."

      Remember, Google is our friend! :-)

        • Re:Not good enough! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by miguel (7116) on Monday June 25 2007, @04:18PM (#19640271) Homepage

          Alrighty. If it is a virtual machine, where can we find documentation about:
          1) the OPCODES of this vm
          2) the standard libraries and interbrowser API
          3) The format of silverlight compiled scripts


          The opcodes of the machine are documented on the standard ECMA 335.

          The standard libaries and browser APIs are available from http://msdn2.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com] a lot of the documentation is still under development for Silverlight 1.1 (1.0 is much more complete) so for a few things that are new in 1.1, you have to guess what they are, or look it up in the WPF docs (which is where stuff ultimately came from).

          The format of the Silverlight compiled scripts is documented in ECMA 335 as well.

    • Re:The MS teams (Score:5, Informative)

      by RingDev (879105) on Monday June 25 2007, @12:12PM (#19637009) Homepage Journal
      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 (Score:5, Informative)

            by miguel (7116) on Monday June 25 2007, @03:30PM (#19639737) Homepage
            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#.

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