11.21.08
Silver Lie and Silver Liars
Picture from a reader
THIS is a subject that was addressed a few days ago, but worth naming are people and sites whose role is apparently to deceive Web developers, having them believe that Silverlight is “coming to GNU/Linux.” It’s not. It never will and those who suggest this should be ridiculed for promoting a Microsoft Big Lie, also known as the Silver Lie.
Slashdot, which is partly sponsored by Microsoft, is among the latest culprits. Paul Krill is at least reserving dignity by not calling it “Silverlight for Linux” and the same goes for DesktopLinux, which neglects to mention the legal implications (Fedora won't touch the thing with a bargepole).
Here is another improper article with an incorrect headline and quotes from Microsoft turncoats.
At the start of November, “we branched Moonlight for the 1.0 release, full with the licensed Microsoft Codecs, and started our release process for Moonlight Beta 1 to be available in the next few days,” revealed Miguel de Icaza, Novell vice president for Developer Technologies. “The Moonlight engine team has now resumed our work on Moonlight 2.0, the version that will track Silverlight 2.0.
When will people wake up? Better now before it's too late. When people say that Moonlight is “Silverlight for Linux” they must be corrected, so else the Silver Lie Big Lie becomes truth, at least in the minds of people. █
“Now [Novell is] little better than a branch of Microsoft”
–LinuxToday Managing Editor
Update: ComputerWorld UK entertains another deceiving article with the headline “Microsoft and Novell put Silverlight on Linux” (by Paul Krill, InfoWorld)
There is a better article from Desire Athow, but it neglects to cover the legal issues.
Needs Sunlight said,
November 22, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I was wondering why there is always so many devoid-of-content, press-release-dressed-as-an-article posts on the main page of Slashdot. This explains a lot.
These puff-pieces often appear to come in bursts, possibly to knock pro-technology (read: pro-FOSS, pro-standards) articles off the main page.
Slashdot could provide a great *security* service by steering people away from MS products. It’s the only product line that can be said to be designed to spread malware and, in particular, viruses. However, part of security is availability and if your data is locked into technologies controlled by a hostile third party *cough*redmond*cough then it becomes unavailable anyway.