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.
It's my end of quarter, and I can't blog at the volume that you deserve. Only seven posts today....I have failed you! :-)
There were a string of posts, however, that deserve to be noted, even if I lack the time to comment on them in detail. Here they are:
- Dana Blankenhorn has one of his best posts yet, this time comparing Novell to a "lead pony" in horse racing. I'm glad to see Novell doing well with some areas of its business, but I agree with Dana that I'd rather see Novell doing this as a real contender, rather than as Microsoft's sidekick (On Novell's Moonlight, Dana writes "...to say [Moonlight] is open source is like calling a lead pony a thoroughbred").
- Gordon Haff calls out the "natural" dynamics of markets that limit monopolies beyond a generation or two. In Microsoft's case, "shifting an entire product foundation is enormously challenging and past skill sets and ecosystem don't necessarily travel well from one generation to another." Bingo.
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Microsoft has been trying hard to get the world to care about Silverlight. Visit Microsoft.com and you'll be forced to install it if you want to stay on the site. Microsoft has also been out on the evangelism trail, talking up its Rich Internet Application platform alternative to Adobe.
As Tim O'Reilly writes, however, it doesn't seem to be having any effect, a fact confirmed by other data, as well. Silverlight is still a dog on the Internet.
... 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."
Microsoft 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:
... Read moreI'm all for interoperability. But I have to wonder at Novell's and Microsoft's apparent definition of the term. Miguel de Icaza rightly took me to task for blanketing Novell with criticism yet, as was pointed out today, there is good reason for criticism of Moonlight/Silverlight:
To the extent that it requires Microsoft patent approval to be effective (and it does, by Miguel's own admission), it is shackled in its potential. Interoperability is to Microsoft what prostitution is to a pimp: a great source of control and income.
Jason Matusow (a great friend and Microsoft employee) crows about what a great example Moonlight is of Microsoft's interop work. But Jason, you have actually only succeeded in proving the point of Microsoft's critics: Microsoft can't seem to engage in interop except on its own, very closed terms. This isn't interoperability.
In other contexts, this is called extortion.
... Read moreIt's getting to the point that Microsoft and Novell just need to get married and stop shamming the "dating dance." I'm referring, of course, to the announcement today that the two companies are formalizing "a collaboration between Microsoft and Novell with the explicit purpose of bringing Silverlight to Linux and do this in a fully supported way.
What "fully supported" means is a question that Mary Jo Foley asks, and does a good job of answering. (She also points out that this collaboration/development has been much stronger than Novell and Microsoft have been telling us.)
But the most interesting take is Tim O'Reilly's:
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