Moonlight Demos (Silverlight on Linux)

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The big RIA news today is that Silverlight is running on Linux. Miguel de Icaza has a post up with some screenshots and by all accounts the demo went well. I think this is great. These guys worked their tails off to get Silverlight implemented on Linux. They’re a bunch of awesome devs and I think that shows that people from all parts of the web are excited about RIAs. On the other hand, I’ve been talking to a lot of customers lately and one of the questions I always ask is how important Linux is to them. 99% of the time they tell me they don’t care about Linux support on the desktop.

But even if customers aren’t rolling out a bunch of Linux desktops, I think it’s still very important to support the platform. One of the great things about Ajax based web applications is that they basically run everywhere. If RIAs are to reach that status and become an integral part of the web, we need to be on Linux. Flash is there, now Silverlight looks like it will be too, and we’re looking to bring AIR to Linux soon after the first release.

I’ve been focusing on Adobe stuff here on my personal blog but I kind of miss talking about more general RIA stuff here as well as ZDNet, so I’m going to be moving back a bit and try to be more RIA-general. Obviously the fact that I work for Adobe has an impact, so keep that in mind when you’re reading.

[tags]Moonlight, Silverlight, Linux[/tags]

Related posts:

  1. Silverlight vs Flash – Point/Counterpoint
  2. What are Linux Users Going to Bitch About when there is a 64 bit Flash Player?
  3. Lee Brimelow on Silverlight
  4. My Interview with the Silverlight Team
  5. Telerik Selling Controls for Silverlight
  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd John Dowdell

    Odd voting pattern at Digg… I’ve never seen such a broad swath of comments voted down so heavily before.
    http://digg.com/linux_unix/Implementing_Silverlight_in_21_Days

    (Disclosure: I decided to join Digg a half-year ago, but only to do support work in comments, and not to introduce or vote on any articles.)

    jd/adobe

  • http://blog.danmcweeney.com dan mcweeney

    As someone who could care less if RIAs make it onto the Linux desktop, I think this is really important. Again, I don’t care — but people some people do and those people are often developers. Not just fly by night guys that write VBA — these are usually hardcore developers who are looking to do serious work and understand open source.
    If I want to build a developer community I want a solid core group of these guys to lean on and it seems MS has figured that out and beat AIR to the punch.
    -d

  • Phillip Kerman

    Interesting concluding thought Ryan… I really do think it’s sort of impossible to be balanced. I mean, it’s not like you can’t try… but I think it’s much like trying to do a one-player chess game.

    I also think that when representatives of various companies (say Adobe or Microsoft) state in their blog that they’re employed at X but their opinions are theirs personally–it sort of doesn’t add up to me.

    I do appreciate your attempts here though… and I can still read it.