Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 155.212.34.122]
on June 02, 2008 08:39 PM
Sun had a pretty ugly, bumpy track record with Java for a while -- there are few licensing issues today, but that wasn't always the case. Flash remains fairly proprietary and Gnash (together with Adobe's recent attempt to properly open the standard) is just catching up.
MS is leveraging Mono's existence to create a competing runtime that has a working open-source implementation "out of the box." (It did take Moonlight a while to develop, but from the looks of things it wasn't especially painful for a complex project.) While we do have to keep our eyes open re: patents, security flaws, and any attempts to extend the standard beyond Moonlight's reach, this smells less like something to fear than an active demonstration of how FOSS can be beneficial and profitable, even for a severely backwards and paranoid company like Microsoft.
On platforms without Flash binaries or perfect builds of the official Sun JRE, it should actually be easier to get Moonlight working. I expect the real showdown will be between each and every of these plugin-based 'RIA' platforms and good old JavaScript/AJAX, which has a devoted following and (as developers have slowly discovered) can provide its own fairly standard VM environment. And we'll still get stuck needing each and every one to be able to enjoy the entire 'web.'
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Re: Novell ushers in Moonlight
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 155.212.34.122] on June 02, 2008 08:39 PMMS is leveraging Mono's existence to create a competing runtime that has a working open-source implementation "out of the box." (It did take Moonlight a while to develop, but from the looks of things it wasn't especially painful for a complex project.) While we do have to keep our eyes open re: patents, security flaws, and any attempts to extend the standard beyond Moonlight's reach, this smells less like something to fear than an active demonstration of how FOSS can be beneficial and profitable, even for a severely backwards and paranoid company like Microsoft.
On platforms without Flash binaries or perfect builds of the official Sun JRE, it should actually be easier to get Moonlight working. I expect the real showdown will be between each and every of these plugin-based 'RIA' platforms and good old JavaScript/AJAX, which has a devoted following and (as developers have slowly discovered) can provide its own fairly standard VM environment. And we'll still get stuck needing each and every one to be able to enjoy the entire 'web.'
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