Novell's Mono team continues to improve its "Microsoft Silverlight on Linux" story, now with the release of Moonlight 1.0, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich media technology for the Web, as CNET reports. It's a major upgrade to Moonlight and brings it closer to parity with Microsoft's Silverlight. Novell's Miguel de Icaza, the developer behind Mono and Moonlight, relied heavily on working in partnership with Microsoft to deliver the upgrade.
Therein lies both the promise and the peril of Moonlight. Well, one of them. For one thing, due to Microsoft-imposed restrictions, Moonlight still doesn't work with a great deal of the Silverlight content on the Web, a fact pointed out by Computerworld.
An even bigger problem, however, is the fact that Microsoft Silverlight is still far behind Adobe Flash in terms of market share. Microsoft, for its part, claims Silverlight is "not dead yet," but Adobe is probably right to stifle a yawn at its efforts to date. Flash has long worked with Linux because Adobe hasn't had the same anti-Linux fetish that has long plagued Microsoft's Jekyll-and-Hyde attempts to be both a platform company and an application company, with the former competing with Linux but the latter (should be) embracing it.
But the biggest problem is the patent encumbrance that comes with Microsoft-blessed Moonlight and Mono. As Mike Schroepfer, formerly the vice president of Engineering at Mozilla (and now serving that role for Facebook), pointed out at Mix'08 and reported by The Industry Standard:
During the discussion, de Icaza explained that while anyone who downloaded Moonlight from Novell was protected by the company's licensing of Silverlight codecs from Microsoft through the company's own cross-licensing agreement....Schroepfer...then raised the question that if he downloads and then distributes the code for Moonlight, would he get the patent protection?
"There is a patent covenant for anyone that downloads [Moonlight] from Novell," answered de Icaza, who then acknowledged that "as to extending the patents to third parties -- you have to talk to Microsoft."
This answer led Schroepfer to point out the inconsistency between having products that are called open source but are "patent-encumbered."
I don't fault Novell/de Icaza for this, but Microsoft can and must do better. If it actually cares about having Silverlight run on Linux through the Moonlight project - and, frankly, I don't think it does - then it should allow Novell to release Moonlight in a patent-unencumbered manner.
Microsoft's current policy puts Linux users in an uncomfortable position if they actually want to exercise their development rights under Moonlight. The only way to safely do so is under Microsoft's watchful eye/patent covenant.
Microsoft continues to struggle with how to interoperate with open source, but it's larger stumbling block is interoperating with the openness of the Web. Moonlight and the patent encumbrances thereto serve as a constant reminder that Microsoft really doesn't grok the Web, which is about freedom of access and open protocols.
Perhaps Microsoft should read more Lessig [PDF], and less Ballmer.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
As new market-share data from Net Applications shows, Google's Chrome got off to a roaring start, and has been coming down to earth lately. In its first few days after release, Google Chrome went as high as 1.16 percent market share, but it started dropping after the euphoria of the announcement died down.
Google Chrome has now settled into a holding pattern around 0.7 percent browser market share.
Cause for alarm? Of course not. Google never intended Chrome to be a one-day-wonder, and I doubt the company is worried about Chrome's market share today. The battle will be won over years, and it will be fought at the developer level against Silverlight and Flash, rather than at the browser level with Firefox and Internet Explorer, and perhaps particularly within the enterprise.
As such, Google doesn't need to win you or me over to Chrome. Its focus is on Web application developers. Once it has those folks optimizing their applications for Chrome, you and I will follow because Chrome will deliver the best experience for working on the Web, rather than simply browsing it.
Adobe is under mounting community pressure to open source Flash, but as The Register reports, it's easier to talk about open source than to actually deliver it. I'm guessing that the fact that Microsoft's Silverlight has yet to make any serious inroads against Flash as the biggest reason for Adobe's alleged lack of appetite for open sourcing Flash.
However, that's just one aspect. There's also the fact that open source is easier as a soundbite than it is as a business strategy. In the case of the Flash player, specifically, 65 percent of the code is not owned by Adobe, making open sourcing it a long and laborious project, just as it was with Sun's Java technology.
Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch recently commented on this to eWeek:
...[W]e need to balance openness and consistency. So we're very open about what goes into Flash Player, the bugs in Flash Player, the code and scripting engine in Flash, the format with Flash, the protocols with Flash. There is incredible openness around Flash. There's a vibrant open-source community where there are dozens of open-source projects that are alive and active. You can go to osflash.org and you can see a lot of those there. So I think open source and Flash is very much a part of the agenda here and a part of the success of Flash today....
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Apple, continuing its reliance on open-source technologies, is using an open-source project called SproutCore to provide rich Internet applications like its new MobileMe service.
The idea is to use to keep Apple from being "locked into the browser plug-ins for...one particular standard."
What is SproutCore? From the SproutCore Web site:
SproutCore is a framework for building applications in JavaScript with remarkably little amounts of code. It can help you build full "thick" client applications in the Web browser that can create and modify data, often completely independent of your Web server, communicating with your server via Ajax only when they need to save or load data.
SproutCore gives Apple a way to enrich its Web experience without locking itself into any other vendor's technology, as the SproutCore site notes:
... Read moreMozilla Europe's founder, Tristan Nitot, has no problem with free software. Indeed, his organization has created some of the best of it. But when software technologies like Adobe Systems' Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight are free but proprietary, they can create all sorts of problems. "Free" without "open" can become a one-way ticket to technology prison.
Adobe has recently taken steps to open up its Flash technology, but Nitot's concern is still valid:
... Read moreHe described the nature of the Web at the moment as open but suggested that "proprietary solutions running on top of the Web are trying to take over"..."So far, there has not been a problem," Nitot said. "Both Adobe and Microsoft have been willing to give (Flash and Silverlight away) for free. But maybe they have an agenda. They're not here for the glory; they're here for the money."
Nitot gave two historical examples of Microsoft and Adobe withdrawing or withholding products from certain platforms: Microsoft's discontinuation of Internet Explorer for Unix and Mac, and Adobe's long-standing refusal to "provide a recent version of Flash for Linux users." He suggested that Web developers should be asking those companies whether they are "sure that Silverlight and Flash will always be available on all platforms (and) run decently on all platforms."
Adobe is proving that it can walk the openness walk, this time by opening up its Flash protocols to facilitate mobile adoption via its Open Screen Project:
...[T]he Open Screen project has five basic elements. Adobe will remove license restriction on the .swf file format [which had required the licensee to promise not to create a competing player]....Adobe will also remove licensing fees for embedding Flash Player on devices....Adobe will also publish a variety of APIs and protocols related to Flash.
Royalty free. Open publication of protocols. No side-deals to ensure a dearth of competition. Maybe Microsoft could take a page from Adobe's playbook. That is, if it wants to be relevant on the web.
As Adobe's Dave McAllister notes:
... Read moreMicrosoft has been making a big push to own the web with Silverlight, but six months into the experiment, few are signing up to help with the coup d'etat. Sure, Microsoft is seeing plenty of downloads (1.5 million per day, in fact, though this may have to do more with Microsoft games than real demand)Computerworld scanned the job boards and printed book titles to gauge Silverlight demand and found it a distant also-ran to Adobe's Flash:
[T]he ratio of jobs mentioning Flash or Silverlight heavily favored the former. Ratios ranged from a high of 67:1 in favor of Flash at Careerbuilder.com to a still weighty 24:1 at Dice.com. All told, averaging ratios from the nine sites found programming jobs requiring Flash skills to be 41 times more plentiful than ones asking for Silverlight.
Silverlight is new and so it's to be expected that it will take time to find publishers and employers who need in-house expertise. Even so, if developers were actively interested in it they would be searching for more information on it. They're not, as this Google Trends report shows:
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