A flash in the pan

For the moment, the main objective of Silverlight is to win marketshare from Flash. Because of Microsoft's ownership of the home desktop and Internet Explorer's continuing dominance of the browser market there is every chance that Silverlight will acheive this, thus weakening Adobe's grip on a much coveted corner of the Web. Silverlight has some technical and many commercial advantages over Flash, which has been evolving since 1996, but it is by no means certain that Flash will fall so easily.

Silverlight has had some successes but at least two early adopters, Major League Baseball in the United States, and ITV, the largest independent broadcaster in the UK, have reverted to Flash after reporting a variety of problems with Silverlight. Some of the bigger users of Flash, most notably YouTube which is owned by Google, who have a pressing interest in maintaining open standards for the Web, are unlikely to switch allegiance, now or in the future.

In the spring of 2008, Adobe and industry partners that included Google, Intel, Nokia, Palm and Motorola, announced the Open Screen Project with the intention of developing a common application interface for Flash, the abolition of licencing fees, and the release of file formats and specifications for Flash and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime).

Some have speculated that Flash may eventually be open sourced. A fully open source Flash might be unstoppable, considerably lengthen the life of Flash, and bring new opportunity to Adobe.

Meanwhile HTML5 remains a moving target. Some of its recommendations such as Canvas are already implemented in the standards compliant browsers, and plug-ins are available for Internet Explorer. HTML5 is the obvious natural successor to the hegemony of Flash for Web developers, because it has the benefit of being entirely open and free, but is some way from a final specification.

Scraping coal along the cave walls

For the Mono/Moonlight developers, who include many long term free software contributors such as Chris Toshok and Larry Ewing, the creator of the Tux mascot, these kinds of problems are incidental when set alongside the resistance of many users of Linux and GNU to Moonlight and Mono. Not surprisingly, the Mono developers have appeared to gain strength and unity from adversity and see themselves as united against the rest of the world. So, for instance, at the end of his triumphant account of the 21 day hacking spree that gave rise to Moonlight, Jeffrey Stedfast felt impelled to write:

"We, as the Free Software Community, wouldn't have all the great and wonderful things that we have today if the developers didn't 'waste their time implementing alternatives.' I urge you to take a moment to reflect on that."

"If, after that reflection, you still wish to resist change: no one is forcing you to use Mono - you're free to remain in the stone age, living in a cave, trying to write software by scraping coal along the cave walls."

It should be possible to see Moonlight in the same light as other tools and plug-ins for proprietary technologies on the Linux desktop, which some use and some refuse, but like Mono, Moonlight is beset with bad publicity, and it seems unlikely that the majority of free software developers are going to rush from their caves, kitchens and offices to welcome Moonlight, or Mono, as the perfect tool for developing desktop applications.

For other feature articles by Richard Hillesley, please see the archive.