Chalk it up to global warming. Earlier tonight, Microsoft and Novell announced plans to bring Silverlight to our shared customers on Linux. In a solution called, “Moonlight”, Novell will be creating a Silverlight implementation as a part of the Mono project.
Why is this significant? It’s a continuation of our commitment to listen to customers and bring Silverlight to the platforms that matter to them. Scrape away the veneer and it’s simple- because they asked us to. Nicely. A lot of credit goes to Miguel de Icaza whom I had the opportunity to meet at MIX. From there, the teams held a series of conversations throughout the summer.
Also in the news, Entertainment Tonight is doubling down with Silverlight, as are about 35 other partners announcing support.
I’d also be remiss to not mention that tomorrow AM, we’re launching Expression Encoder. If you’re looking for an easy tool to publish video and audio content or even live events with Silverlight, Expression Encoder is your tool. In the coming weeks, we’ll also release a plug-in for publishing directly to Silverlight Streaming and an API that makes it easy to publish via other services.
Too much for one blog post. Net-net, at MIX we said we’d deliver Silverlight 1.0 this Summer* and we did. Silverlight 1.1 is in tandem development and significant resources are going to this effort. It’s time to Light up the Web.
Congratulations to the teams who made this possible. Truly the most “can do” effort in my time at MSFT.
(Note: Many web properties will launch tomorrow AM Pacific by design)
3 responses to “It's official: Silverlight coming to Linux”
Why this sounds nice on the surface, this is actually a bad thing. That is, if Microsoft isn’t building it and maintaining it from the same source tree, then it will quickly get out-of-date and incompatible. I applaud the effort, but it is really wrong to have it done this way. For example, where is Silverlight 1.1 with .NET support? When will that be ready? Will it be pixel-for-pixel equivalent? Will it be bug-for-bug equivalent? Let’s give an example of a project done right for cross platform – Firefox or even Safari. There is one source tree that controls all the versions and it sim-ships on all platforms on the same day.
This is bad and not what we want. Some people love Mono, most don’t. The Mono runtime and class libraries are out of date with Windows and you can’t write one application that runs on Windows, Linux and OS-X with Mono. No disresptect to the Mono guys, but they never really finish – it always feels like a beta.
What we want is Microsoft to own the source code and deliver for Windows, OS-X, Linux, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm OS.
Thanks for sharing your perspective Ryan. It’s good feedback and will help to ensure that we work closely with the Moonlight (Mono) team.
Thanks for posting the details and the roundup on your blog. I linked to you on a couple different locations on the web. This is great news! Nice to see Silverlight being a *real* cross-platform technology. I hate it when companies say they’re cross-platform, but really mean they only support Macs besides Windows.
In regards to Mono, I think Microsoft should work hand-in-hand with this open source project to keep development on that end current. It would be a wise move for Microsoft in general to do this since they leverage .NET. However, if the Silverlight team wants to make and extra effort to work with these guys, I’m sure it would be well received by the community.
BTW, why hasn’t Microsoft worked with the Mono-Project to get premium Windows Media content supported on Linux yet?