[ale] Flash Video

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sun, 2010-06-20 at 10:08 -0400, James Taylor wrote:
> Actually, Flash and Silvelight/Moonlight are two different products
> and play two entirely different media streams.
> I am an advocate of Novell products, but I refuse to use Moonlight, if
> for no other reason than to no support yet another MS proprietary
> protocol.
> I'll deal with flash because it is fairly common, and does support
> linux.
> As for Novell paying fees to MS... RedHat has similar arrangements
> with MS, too. They just were a lot smarter about the way they dealt
> with the the information.
> -jt 

Silverlight/Moonlight isn't a "protocol".  It is an implementation of
the CLR (common language runtime) which can run in the Web browser.  It
has a "virtual CPU", like Java, where it executes bytecode that
represents opcodes and parameters for the fictitious CPU.  The first
time it encounters a method that has yet to be JIT'd (at least in the
Novell implementation of the CLR---I do not know how the Microsoft
implementation behaves) it JIT compiles the method and then executes the
native binary (unlike Java, which will profile code first and then
decide what to JIT later).

A couple of years ago I benchmarked a few things written in C# with
analogs written in C and compiled with GCC; performance was directly
comparable, though of course the C# version executed in the CLR consumed
more memory.  However, it wasn't *that* much more.  If anyone wants me
to, I can go ahead and run some more benchmarks at some point to compare
current Mono and current GCC to re-evaluate them now...

But in any event, Mono is relatively simple:

      * Mono is free software.  The C# compiler is dual-licensed; you
        can choose to use the terms of the MIT/X11 license, or you can
        choose to use the terms of the GNU General Public License when
        you modify and redistribute Mono.  The Mono tools are GPL.  The
        runtime libraries for Mono are GNU LGPL 2.0.  The class
        libraries are MIT/X11.  The ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET AJAX add-ons
        are Microsoft software under the Ms-PL, which is an OSI approved
        license[0] and is considered by the Free Software Foundation to
        be a free software license (albeit GPL-incompatible)[1].
              * The 

	--- Mike

[0] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html
[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ms-pl