Moonlight 2 Released | Hacker News Reader

Moonlight 2 Released

tirania.org

16 pointsfelixmar11 comments

"We worked with Microsoft to make sure that Moonlight was available to everyone on Linux and BSD."

Why doesn't Microsoft just open source Silverlight? Much as I applaud the energy and work of the Moonlight developers, I personally would have a lot of difficulty with donating my time to do a multi-billion-dollar corporation's job.

Do you feel the same way about MySQL, Java, or Eclipse, for example? Why is it so bad that a group of developers are motivated to port a commercial product? And why is the reaction "MS should do this" instead of "Thanks MS for helping out".

I just don't get the animosity around Mono and Moonlight. Those guys have balls, and they're doing great work to bring a set of technologies and tools to Linux. Why is this in any way bad? And please leave the IP poisoning arguments at the door--those have been thoroughly addressed and that horse has been beaten to a bloody pulp.

I was just expressing my personal opinion. I have nothing against them porting whatever they like. I just don't understand the motivation myself.

Just think, what if the same effort that went into copying Silverlight had been put into creating a true open source alternative to Flash and Silverlight?

there "are" open source alternatives to flash.

Which ones? I only know SVG, but I suspect it doesn't really cover everything that flash does.

It's just strange that MS uses its resources, both directly and indirectly, to help Mono/Moonlight when it just could opensource (parts of) .NET/Silverlight.

The page indicates that Moonlight contains 125,000 LOC (of roughly 500k) from open source Silverlight controls put out by Microsoft.

Patents or some other intellectual property rights might be an issue. Opensourcing a product of that scale can be very complicated. Java comes to mind, for example. It took Sun about two years from the initial announcement to a completely opensource release of JDK.

On my phone so I can't search thoroughly yet. Does this mean netflix silverlifht drm is dealt with?

not sure why this got downvoted? by dealt with, i meant: can i watch netflix on linux yet and have the drm issues been legally+properly dealt with to ensure viewers can enjoy the experience and copyright owners feel protected?

Miguel says "It is very unlikely that we will get PlayReady DRM on Linux."

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