Thread: Silverlight for Meego
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chowdahhead is offline chowdahhead
2010-08-06 , 12:01
Posts: 71 | Thanked: 36 times | Joined on Nov 2009 @ CT, USA
#26
Originally Posted by johnel View Post
Personally I hate Flash because it's closed source, very resource hungry and as a result can exclude people from enjoying content.

But a simple fact is many people in this forum want it and Nokia/Adobe are unwilling to provide it.

Silverlight is obviously a competitor to Flash but at least an open version of it exists - moonlight, and generally works quite well.

The source code for moonlight is available and anyone can port it also the video codecs are available (binary only and seperate licence) it's not perfect but a much better solution than Flash.

It's bad enough there are closed-source drivers in MeeGo.
Open versions of Flash exist also, but suffer from the same problem as Moonlight--they are several versions behind the commercially developed products and are not feature compatible. The legality of the codecs in Moonlight is questionable since they contain Microsoft technology among others, and while this is covered by the Novell-Microsoft patent agreement, indemnifying Suse, it's my understanding that other Linux distributions cannot ship the codec pack.

As frustrating as Adobe Flash has always been, and as I type this on 64-bit Linux still clinging to the last 64-bit beta Flash library, I think we'd be in a much more precarious situation if the respective marketshares of Flash and Silverlight were reversed. I'm just not certain that Silverlight/Moonlight is the answer, regardless of the technical merits of the platform.