Olympic ski jump facility, Calgary

Summary: Fresh complaints about Moonlight and about Mono

MOST of our posts about the Olympic games have been about what Microsoft did to them using Silver Lie [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], with few exceptions. Moonlight was rarely allowing GNU/Linux to gain access to the content because it was not intended to; Moonlight is about selling the illusion of cross-platform for Silver Lie. It's also a software patents liability.

ZDNet Australia has just published this rant:

Moonlight's Olympic-sized failure

[...]

As history shows, Microsoft only produces the Silverlight runtime for Windows and OS X, leaving Linux support to Novell's Mono project, which produces Moonlight. Mono developers argue that Mono is not chasing tail lights, but in the case of Moonlight it very clearly is.

The Olympics player made use of Silverlight 3.0, which was available from mid-2009. Moonlight on the other hand is only stable up to Silverlight 2 (first released in late 2008) and only offers Silverlight 3 support as a 3.0 preview release.

[...]

There were other such failures throughout the site that resulted in an overall very frustrating experience and not one to recommend at all. In comparison, watching the opening and closing ceremonies in HD on an iMac was far better than watching it via the analog TV option.

With all these problems, it is clear that Moonlight is not up to scratch; thank goodness Flash videos have less Linux issues and HTML5 video is (hopefully) coming. For a company that has $991 million in cash (PDF), I'd have hoped that Novell would back Moonlight to have it ready in time for the Olympics showcase, but alas.

This is just another important reminder of the fact that Moonlight is not much of a blessing. In another new Australian article about Canonical's dependence on Yahoo! [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], there is an ending that mentions Mono.

But there is a little more of Mono in this release, with a third application, a game called gbrainy being dependent on the clone of Microsoft technology.

Earlier releases had the two applications F-Spot and Tomboy which were dependent on Mono. This trend seems to be growing.

We've covered gbrainy in [1, 2]. ⬆