Summary: Good riddance to bad rubbish, agree several bloggers amid the death of Microsoft (and Novell's) Moonlight

THE official death of Moonlie did not escape the attention of bloggers, some of whom celebrated with headlines such as "Moonlight Is Dead, So Is Silverlight" (source) while others put it differently, e.g. "Moonlight, the open source Silverlight project for Linux, is dead" (source). To quote the former:

Miguel de Icaza, the creator of Mono, and Moonlight has announced that Moonlight will no longer be maintained.

Quoting the latter:

When critics have pointed out that the Microsoft Silverlight plugin lacks Linux support, fans have pointed to Moonlight, an independent open source Linux / Unix version designed by Miguel de Icaza's Mono project. But while Microsoft has merely backed away from Silverlight development, de Icaza now says that Mono is done with Moonlight altogether. "We have abandoned Moonlight," he says in a recent interview. "These days we no longer believe that Silverlight is a suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology, there are just too many limitations for it to be useful."

Here is the better coverage which we found of the important (to us) event:

Just today I saw an article that mentions Moonlight (open source Silverlight) is being abandoned. The reasons were that Silverlight is not being adopted as originally intended. In the article, Miguel de Icaza states that with Silverlight, "there are just too many limitations for it to be useful.", and that "Microsoft added artificial restrictions to Silverlight that made it useless for desktop programming.". Here you are getting feedback at the core of development for Microsoft's supposed "love" for open source, where restrictions are doing more harm for the technology than good. The article also draws conclusions that Microsoft may be looking away from the .NET platform altogether, mainly for Silverlight. Silverlight maybe, but I doubt for the entire .NET platform.

Personally, this adds to my conclusions that .NET on non-Microsoft platforms was a half-hearted attempt right from the beginning. I think Microsoft is still learning that to be a true contributor to open source, it must dive in with good intentions. And from my perspective based on past and present actions, I don't see this happening anytime soon. There are too few products that Microsoft fully supports for non-Windows, that don't contain some sort of restrictions. Microsoft obviously dislikes the GNU GPL. But I have a feeling that if they were to release more products under the GPL as true free and open products, they might have a chance at being successful with them. Now the question is, where is the entire Mono project headed, is it doomed as well? Only time will give us the real answer.

The original coverage, from Microsoft MVP Miguel de icaza, was not so noteworthy. A few months ago he inquired in the mailing lists to see if Moonlight was dead yet. If even the Microsoft fan declares it dead, then it's dead. What a total waste of developers' time. ⬆