Let’s try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now—as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight.
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I particularly enjoyed that entry by Sridhar also. He pretty much says it like it is. The main reason for not choosing MS is trust.
This blog post reads like just another anti-MS rant by a proponent of open source, who apparently isn’t an MS developer and naturally wants to promote his/her own preferences.
If Zoho doesn't use the Visual Studio IDE to produce their web site, doesn't have .NET developers in their web development team, and does have Flash designers – obviously this is a fundamental reason why it would be less easy for them to adopt Silverlight today. This is the reality of it; but the blogger neglects to mention this key fact, while acknowledging that "Silverlight is a great piece of technology" as though they'd adopt it tomorrow if they could only trust MS.
Early adopters of Silverlight are typically development teams who already use MS development tools already have strong MS development skills -- obviously. (MS tools and skills are not required for developing Silverlight applications, but they do make it very easy and the alternatives are not yet well known by those with less expertise in MS technology.)
To quote one of the main web dudes at Bungie.net:
"Silverlight was advantageous to us because it uses the same authoring tools we already have (Visual Studio) and are very familiar with. Oh, and ActionScript is ****." (Achronos)
http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=215 76301&postRepeater1-p=1#21576470
(Bungie.net is the web site for the top MS-backed game, Halo. It's by far the most feature-rich and content-rich of all gaming web sites, consistently leading the way for other game studios to strive to emulate.)
The blogger also implies that not being open source is automatically bad, which isn’t true. (Incidentally, tried to find a download link for the source code behind the solutions provided by “Zoho” but couldn’ find one.)
Flash isn’t open source, far from it; but it seems the blogger is only interested in seeking open source alternatives to Microsoft products. In fact, Flash is more proprietary than Silverlight and forces developers to use and pay for Adobe products, while Silverlight can be developed without proprietary tools. If the blogger were an open source proponent and understands Silverlight, objectively he/she should celebrate that.
We would all welcome more competition for Flash by Google or anybody else. Adobe has enjoyed a monopoly for too long and now falls far short of the quality that we expect of technology and development tools.
ASP.NET MVC fanboy - 8th June 2009 12:16 - #
I've often wondered whether a blog can have its credibility undermined by providing links to bad articles; even linking to other blog posts which exhibit common problems such as strong bias, wild speculation, inaccurate or out-dated information, etc.
Sridhar writes: "What could Microsoft do to earn our trust? For starters, they could really support all the web standards on IE."
IE8 has been confirmed as a fully standards compliant web browser for over a year now, and is arguably the most CSS 2.0 compliant browser:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/04/ie8_web_st andards/
MS does in fact listen to the concerns of its critics, and frequently acts on such feedback to improve its products and services. (That's why it's been of the world's most successful companies for so long. MS isn't perfect though, nobody would pretend that it is.)
Regrettably, as this blog very clearly demonstrates, when MS addresses the key concerns of its critics, the anti-MS community (including open source fans and unemployed anti-corporate hippies) take no notice.
Indeed, as we have seen above, many anti-MS bloggers are so far behind in their knowledge, and so ignorant of the MS products they're trying to criticise, they can end up regurgitating the same flawed anti-MS arguments for months or even years after they've been proved wrong.
Bloggers who are sincere and serious about web standards welcome any improvements in compliance, and this is reflected in what they write and which web pages they link to. (Bloggers who are more concerned with bashing MS or serving their own interests and promoting open source act accordingly.)
Standards Geek - 8th June 2009 22:15 - #
Hard to argue with the central premise - a google version of Silverlight would be open source.
Silverlight is a great programming experience, but no reason why it *couldn't* be open source, it isn't a revenue generator for Microsoft.
Michael Foord - 9th June 2009 00:00 - #
Guys, astroturf much?
Michael Koziarski - 9th June 2009 00:01 - #
Hmm... although Silverlight *does* interoperate with Javascript.
Google is committed to Javascript however and unlikely to go down this road.
Also I don't see why Zoho would jump from Flash to a Google Silverlight...
Michael Foord - 9th June 2009 00:02 - #
ASP.NET MVC fanboy: "Flash is more proprietary than Silverlight and forces developers to use and pay for Adobe products" - that's odd, as I could have sworn I wrote TheyWorkForYou's video matching Flash program using the totally open source version of Flex, in vim. Source code, such that it is, here: https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/dir?d=mysocie ty/twfy/flex
Matthew - 9th June 2009 00:05 - #
Saying IE8 is all about the standards because it supports CSS 2.0 is missing the forest for the trees--it's missing large parts of emerging standards like HTML5, and given Microsoft's typically lax update cycle it's unlikely to support what's looking like the future of the web (again, see Google as an example).
Also, the implication that open source "fans" are equivalent to "unemployed anti-corporate hippies" is a ridiculous assertion, and certainly one that doesn't gel with the fact that most of the Internet is built on open source and standardised systems.
Being CSS 2.0 compliant was something to be excited about six years ago.
Even being CSS 2.1 compliant (which IE8 purports to be) is nothing of any significance by now, given that other browsers are implementing many CSS3 modules already, and are even paving the road on new technologies that the W3C has now adopted for CSS3 (like Transitions, Transforms & Gradients). All of which are much more interesting and appealing technologies than Silverlight, and they are formal Web Standards (unlike Silverlight).
Maybe I should make my policy on quotations clear somewhere on the site: I quote opinions that I find interesting or thought provoking; quoting something doesn't mean I necessarily agree with it.
That said, in this case I completely agree with the quotation. Silverlight is uninteresting to me because it's a closed implementation of a closed standard. If Google had released it it would have been open source and hence much more likely to catch my interest - as they've shown with Gears and now Wave.
The Zoho blog post contains so many factual errors and sp much bias and misinformation, I barely know where to begin.
"Let's try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. ... They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5."
The Silverlight runtime already does interoperate perfectly with web client scripting and markup. So what is the point of this statement? This is wild and pointless speculation by a blogger who manifestly does not understand the product he's/she's trying to write about.
Moreover, this is one of the most important advantages of Silverlight. In fact you can write your entire Silverlight application from scratch (e.g. an interactive 3D game, a video player like YouTube, etc) in 100% pure JavaScript! Try doing that in Flash or a Java applet.
Microsoft has handed you a genuinely good, quick, easy way to develop and deploy rich internet applications. You don't even have to buy any proprietary software to create Silverlight apps. You can do it in plain text in your web page with JavaScript using Notepad/ WordPad/TextPad/etc. It's pretty clear that this blogger hasn't even tried it yet. Don’t take my word for it, try it yourself and see what you think.
"Microsoft pledged that they will always support Silverlight on Mac and Linux, and on browsers other than IE. Do you really, really believe their promise?"
This would be a fair question based on previous mistakes by MS, but the question is flawed by an implicit misunderstanding of what Silverlight actually is.
Silverlight is just a name. For development purposes, it's essentially a subset of the .NET framework. The virtual machine on which Slverlight runs is essentially a compact verision of .NET's Common Language Runtime packaged as a browser plug-in optimised for each supported platform. Therefore question is not wheher or not we trust MS to support an isolated product, because .NET is MS's primary development framework. Neither do we need to ask whether Silverlight will continue to support major platforms, because this is in fact the whole point of the product, in fact MS's entire strategy for this area of the business dictates that the range of supported platforms will increase.
Silverlight is an integral part of Microsoft's proposition for cross-platform deployment and web client technology. For the web, it's no less important than Internet Explorer. For cross-platform deployment, it's MS's answer not only to Flash but also to Java. It's the future.
Even at this very early stage in the life of the product (iterations up to and including 2.0) supported platforms already include Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and support for mobile devices is set to increase with full support on Windows CE, Windows Mobile 6, and Symbian/Series 60 phones, expected in 2010.
"What could Microsoft do to earn our trust? For starters, they could really support all the web standards on IE."
IE8 is fully compliant with current web standards. Again, the blogger demonstrates ignorance of the topic being discussed. Next question?
"IE is increasingly an embarrassment of a browser and a pain for developers to support."
IE is still the dominant browser. You could equally argue that the alternatives are a pain and should have been more consistent with MS. But this has changed with IE8 as already stated. In other words, MS has taken steps to improve harmonization between browsers, giving up on debated territory where other parties refused to budge.
Shanwaraz Khan - 9th June 2009 08:42 - #
"Moreover, this is one of the most important advantages of Silverlight. In fact you can write your entire Silverlight application from scratch (e.g. an interactive 3D game, a video player like YouTube, etc) in 100% pure JavaScript! Try doing that in Flash or a Java applet."
Uh, you know that ActionScript is based on ECMAScript, right? JavaScript devs can start plugging away with ActionScript pretty much straight away.
Jason Madigan - 9th June 2009 10:33 - #
Proprietary development platforms like (but not limited to) Flash and Silverlight will never be more than a very useful shim to get features and functionality that will eventually be replaced by open standards.
Zach Leatherman - 9th June 2009 17:29 - #
This is an interesting topic:
Is it true that open source is somehow implicitly better than closed source? No, absolutely not.
We could cite reasonable arguments for either approach in different situations. Of course, there will always be people with vested interests who become too entrenched on one side or the other to contribute objectively to the debate.
Most ordinary front-line web developers would welcome more alternatives to Flash, by Google or anybody else – open source or otherwise.
But if we’re honest, it makes little difference whether it's open source or not. If Silverlight were open source, naturally the open source community would welcome that and it wouldn't be a bad thing.
Many of us are busy people. We're more than happy to use a good closed source solution without worrying about the source code, whether it's a browser plug-in or a C++ DLL, it can be a black box.
Personally, my focus is on delivering solutions to specific problems or commercial requirements quickly and effectively. I don't always want to contribute to an open source project and I don't always have time. I'm more than happy to use or purchase a good product and let somebody else do the development work, whether closed source or open source.
ASP.NET MVC fanboy - 10th June 2009 09:23 - #
Jason Madigan said: "JavaScript devs can start plugging away with ActionScript pretty much straight away."
This is incorrect and also misunderstands the problem and actually misses the point in the comment being replied to.
1. The point was, you can create Silverlight in pure JavaScript in the code of your web page. Hopefully any solution from Google would also offer this. JS developers really can create Silverlight right now with no additional tools or knowledge -- just by referring to Silverlight's object model and XAML schema. All of which are open and public. (In contrast, ActionScript and everything else in the development of a Flash application is proprietary to Adobe and tied down to their development tools.)
2. Being able to write JavaScript absolutely does not qualify somebody to write ActionScript! Furthermore, being able to write ActionScript does not mean you can create good Flash applications, there is very much more to Flash than scripting. I wouldn't hire a JS developer to produce Flash and neither would you. I could and would hire a JS developer to develop Silverlight.
ASP.NET MVC fanboy - 10th June 2009 09:40 - #
I'd argue that it is. Closed source has practically no advantages over open source (you could argue that "commercial support" and "someone to sue" are advantages, but many large open source projects have companies associated with them that will happily take on those roles). Open source has an enormous set of advantages:
Actually there is one other advantage to closed source software: you might be able to strike a deal that prevents your competitors from using it, giving you a competitive advantage. I can't think of any others.
The real take-home message from this discussion seems very simple, and very clear:-
*** There is no open source alternative to Flash! ***
In the web browser plug-in market it was the closed source people who delivered, yet again; first with Flash, and now again with Silverlight which is even better.
This story started 14 years ago when Flash arrived, but the only open source contribution to the story so far has been a heap of negative blog posts about Microsoft. If the open source community wrote more code instead of writing their blogs, and a delivered solutions rather than an ongoing rumination of problems, we would not be having this discussion.
The failure of open source to deliver in this case is also the real take-home message within the anti-MS blog quote cited above. Indeed, this is only indisputable informational content in that quote; the remainder of the content is nothing but speculation and anti-MS pro-Google hyperbolae. This is not something that I would celebrate or post on my blog. Yet in a remarkable feat of convoluted logic, the author attempts to convert this scenario into a pro open source diatribe, by insisting that if the open sourcers had delivered a solution it would no doubt be so very much better than any software conceived by the evil M$. What a joke! This has been a thoroughly entertaining glimpse of open source fantasy. But returning to reality, open source has not delivered on this one -- end of story.
Permit me to propose a new and equally constructive quote for anti-MS bloggers to disseminate: "Those foolish closed source software developers! With all these advantages of open source now written down so neatly in a bullet-pointed list, and only one advantage of closed source coming to mind! Those millions of closed source software developers in this world, and the billions of closed source software users, they must surely be deluded beyond hope as they continue to pursue closed source solutions when 'open source is better'. The brainwashing in the PR of the closed source (by definition bad/worse) heretics must be extremely effective! If only the enlightened closed source community (by definition good/better) had such efficacious propaganda, things might be very different..."
Returning to reality, another fact which makes the anti-Silverlight vibe from the open source community so utterly ridiculous is that as we all know perfectly well there is in fact a version of Silverlight available from the open source community, known as Moonlight. It's collaboration between Novell and Microsoft, and forms part of the Mono project. If the open source community were sincere about an open source alternative to Flash, they would approve of this as a step in the right direction, but they do no such thing. Instead, conspicuously, as we can all see with our own eyes, the open sourcers prefer not even to mention Moonlight when writing about open source alternatives to Flash. They prefer to close their eyes and make a wish for Google, their champion and Messiah, to save the day by producing a different open source alternative to Flash (one that has nothing to do with Microsoft). Regrettably, while Silverlight version 3.0 is almost ready, Moonlight has fallen behind and is still at version 1.0. Again, the open source alternative fails to deliver. Yet I've lost count of the times I've read open source bloggers ranting that "Silverlight 2 doesn't support Linux" and blaming or criticising Microsoft. Moonlight does support Linux! Indeed it was Microsoft's attempt to please the open sourcers! And we're still waiting for the open sourcers to deliver version 2!
Incidentally, I delayed posting this because I wanted to link to the official web site of the Mono project, but their site was down every time I clicked it in Google's search results. Their site was down again most of yesterday afternoon, so I gave up. I tried it from two different machines in the US and UK, and the domain name resolved but there was no response from their web server (LAMP, Linux/SuSE on Apache/2.0.59, open source platform). The server didn't even reply to a ping. Today the web site is back up, but the HTML on the front page is so bad that it breaks in IE and I couldn't read anything past the first bullet point under the "Goals" section, because the text is dark and the dark blue background covers 90% of the page. (If open source software is implicitly "better", does that mean a problem like this is more likely to be the human factor, the people rather than the technology -- open source developers, system administrators, etc?) A web site that doesn't work is not a good service. I am genuinely, sincerely relieved that I am not depending on this web site. I'm a real front-line developer and some of the work I need to do today is for business critical projects. Thankfully I use the proper original IDE from Microsoft, and not Mono. I could not use Mono even if I wanted to, because no it simply doesn't provide all of the features that I need. Even the best open source salesman in the world with an infallible argument that open source is "better" cannot alter the cold hard reality that the open source solution does not deliver what I need. If I were an open source convert I could be strong and compromise on principle, but I would be making life harder for myself.
As Wikipedia points out, open source software has earned the label "derivative" not "innovative". This observation is not unfounded.
All too often, an open source product exists primarily to compete with an established and often superior commercial solution, providing a cheap alternative for those who are willing to sacrifice aspects of the original product to save money.
To cite a few of the most famous examples: OpenOffice after Microsoft Office; GIMP after Adobe Photoshop; Mono after Microsoft's Visual Studio; etc; etc. Of course there have been examples of open source products which were novel or superior, but it comes down to what works best for the individual.
As a developer specialising in .NET/C#, who for several years previously specialised in Java/J2EE, the latter example is of special interest. I'd gladly consider doing it the cheaper and way. But again, open source simply has not delivered a superior or even equal solution. All the text-book benefits of open source that you can list sound great in principle, but I have a job to do and I want the best product I can get.
ASP.NET MVC fanboy - 13th June 2009 10:38 - #
There are now two increasingly credible open source alternatives to Flash: canvas and SVG. Both are supported in all of the modern browsers (it's hard to call IE modern any more). The HTML5 video and audio elements help complete the circle.
You misunderstood the original article (and the bit I quoted). We're not saying that an open source solution would have been technically better. We're saying that it would be more likely to be adopted by the growing number of developers and entrepreneurs who shy away from building their products on top of closed source platforms.
You obviously don't shy away from building on top of closed source platforms, and that's fine. We do.
Forgive me, I'm not trying to disagree for the sake of it, but I do want to clarify this key point.
I said: "Is it true that open source is somehow implicitly better than closed source?"
To which you replied: "I'd argue that it is."
Now you're saying "You misunderstood the original article (and the bit I quoted). We're not saying that an open source solution would have been technically better."
Can you see the problem? Perhaps its just the wording.
The original quote also implied that open source is better, listing it as something positive that Google would have done.
You mentioned "SVG" and "Canvas" but but would you really use these instead of Flash for real commercial web applications today? They're nowhere near as useful as Flash. I've never seen a single web site using these as a Flash alternative. I've never even seen a web site that uses them (unless I go out of my way to try and find an example).
You're right about one thing: I don't mind working with closed source technology. But rest assured, I don't mind working with open source either. I try to use the best solution available for a particular problem.
ASP.NET MVC fanboy - 13th June 2009 18:56 - #
Fair point - I wasn't very clear there. What I meant was that given two products that perform more or less the same functionality where one is open source, I would consider it superior - not necessarily for price reasons, but for the other reasons I list above.
ASP.NET MVC is actually a really good example. By all accounts it is a very solid product, but I wouldn't use it because there are numerous open source packages that solve the same set of problems to a similar standard. If it ran on the open source stack I would be much more likely to use it - which is the same argument outlined by the original quotation.
As for canvas and SVG, people already are building commercial web applications using them - http://280slides.com/ is a great example. The original Google Maps is a great example of something which could have been built in Flash (as Yahoo!'s competing product originally was) but was instead built using open web technologies (and a bit of VML to make up for IE not supporting SVG or canvas).