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"

Re:The MS teams

[flyingfsck]

Ready to ship? More debugging? Certainly this is the point where MS would ship it...

Re:And the novelty is... ?

[ozmanjusri]

Oooh, Linux developers copied a Microsoft product in two weeks!

Strictly speaking, Linux developers copied Microsoft's copy of a product acquired by Adobe from FutureSplash via Macromedia.

Re:And the novelty is... ?

[suv4x4]

Strictly speaking, Linux developers copied Microsoft's copy of a product acquired by Adobe from FutureSplash via Macromedia.

That's not strict at all.

Microsoft used their copy of Java (.NET) to create a copy of FutureSplash which Adobe acquired via Macromedia, and Linux developers used their copy of Microsoft's copy of Java (.NET) to create a copy of the copy of FutureSplash.

Re:Wonderful

[A Clint]

This was the most interesting part of the video to me, from the narrator's commentary:

"... I'm doing this on Windows Vista and Internet Explorer, but you can just as easily do this on Windows XP, Firefox, or even a Mac in - [audio suddenly cuts off] ... Now I'm going to..."

I suppose he was going to say Safari? In any case it was sloppy editing.

He must not have edited this with Silverlight, because Silverlight makes precision editing so easy.

Re:And the novelty is... ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some things start with a copy, but end up being better than the original

That's definitely not the case in this thread.

Re:That's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

I love Perl and use it on a daily bases. But it seems like of lot of things are going the route of Python and Ruby. When did this happen?

When the growth of requirements exceeded the number of smart people, so more and more people entered programming who aren't smart enough to cope with expressive languages like C++ and Perl, which prize clever solutions that clever people can enjoy discovering. This led to the wide adoption of restrictive lowest-common-denominator languages like Java and Python, which prize doing things the long and tedious way so that Dumbo McMathbehard can maintain your code.

Re:Go Miguel

[aichpvee]

Wow, you just listed like the 4 worst things about Linux.

Re:Cool, but ultimately pointless

[delire]

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.

As a desktop Linux user of many years, I couldn't care if Satan himself made an open-source, open-standards competitor to Flash(ism): I'd gladly use it and encourage it's distribution.

Congrats to Miguel & Co.

Re:Wonderful

[chris_mahan]

What? You forgot the url to google.com?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Sklyarov [wikipedia.org]

Re:No Mono in Moonlight

[midtoad]

Ahem. from the installation instructions for Moonlight:

Steps:

      1. Install Mono 1.2.4 for Unix

Re:What is Silverlight?

[OpenGLFan]

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

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

Vapourware.

Re:Closer to the subject than anti-trust.

[MightyYar]

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

Re:The name

[chromatic]

What's wrong with Monopolight?

Re:Wonderful

[Raideen]

Yeah, I can't wait to install Microsoft software on my Linux systems.

Re:Wonderful

[mgiuca]

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...