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 :)

The MossyBlog Times Archives 2007 - 2009 : Novell

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

Silverlight shipped and supports Linux.