The MossyBlog Times Archives 2007 - 2009 : Moonlight

Adobe's Flex and a Curious Definition of "Open" for RIA Platforms

scbarnes — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 04:40:22 GMT

In my RSS hunt & aggregate daily routine, I stumbled upon an article that initially made me groan. It did so as I thought to myself "here we go, another Proprietary vs Open Source debate, the never goes anywhere" and I was hoping that it for once left Microsoft out of the discussion heh.

Well I'm actually glad in many respects I read this as Miguel de Icaza has set the record straight around the codec license issues surrounding Silverlight + Linux (aka Moonlight).

In the United States and Europe if you want to redistributed this media software (and avoid getting sued) you must have a patent license with MPEGLA/Thompson. In the case of Moonlight, Microsoft has agreed to pay the fees related to distributing the codecs for Linux and taking care of the patent fees. It also happens to come in the form of giving us their tuned code for video decoding, as opposed to using the reference VC-1 implementation (which is known to be quite slow, but is available for download to MPEGLA licensees).

It for me reiterates, we are/can be a positive influence in the overall open source community, but sadly our praise isn't amplified as much. It's a red flag in front of the anti-Microsoft bull, but what the heck, I enjoyed reading Miguel's post and it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling that I'm glad the company I work for can help move projects like Moonlight forward.

I'm sure there's going to be complaints...

See the article here:

Adobe's Flex and a Curious Definition of "Open" for RIA Platforms
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/12/adobes_flex_and_a_curious_defi.html

My take on the Novell Partnership, derived from Dick Costello.

scbarnes — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 15:28:00 GMT

I read this from Read/WriteWeb, it was a quote given by Dick Costello, (co-founder of FeedBurner, which Google acquired this year).

"Pay careful attention to the things that people do with your technology/service/product, because some of them may have discovered a powerful use for it that has completely evaded you. Note that this is another reason to strongly believe that services and products that are more open and adaptive will always prevail over solutions that are less open. Open solutions enable the ecosystem to discover the optimal value of the solution, whereas less open systems are at the mercy of their creator having guessed at the optimal solution in the first place."

To me, my thoughts strayed to Silverlight and the Novell partnership, Silverlight is quite open and at times exposed to what others may do with it. The Moonlight folks found a way forward, armed with little and yet achieved ever so much. Their reward, Microsoft in turn works with them not against them.

This partnership means so many things to so many people, but mostly being still in my rookie year at Microsoft, it flawed me as it showed me that the Microsoft that I knew over the past 5 years is different to what I see today.

Silverlight shipped and supports Linux.

scbarnes — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 07:37:00 GMT

I could rant about why this is important and add my own commentary around why it's probably one of the boldest moves Microsoft has made, but you'll no doubt be reading a lot of this from others on the interweb.

I will say, that RIA is a concept best built with partners and an eco-system surrounding it. If there are developers world-wide attached to the Silverlight Runtime chances are there will be an entire partner ecosystem to support it. The Novell/Moonlight deal is one of many examples where it's about what we do with the technology, but what others do with it as well.

The Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) is but an example of this, and this is why I believe Silverlights best days are still ahead of it.

The penguin graphic was from Kurt Brockett, and he's done a great blog post on highlighting the "E" from the old brand "WPF/E".

It’s great to see Microsoft supporting the Linux platform as having true cross-platform support does include all 3: Windows, OSX and Linux. Nice to see them embrace the work of the team over at mono-project.com

Next step, distribution :)