[ale] Flash Video

[Michael B. Trausch]

Sorry about the premature send earlier... I hit Control+Enter because I
missed Shift.  :-P

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; see [0] for licensing terms for Mono.
        Every license used qualifies as a free software license (and the
        Ms-PL includes a non-exclusive, world wide, royalty-free patent
        grant as well, like the Apache license, if memory serves).
      * Mono is an _independent_ reimplementation of the Microsoft CLR
        from ECMA and ISO standards.  It does not use Microsoft source
        code to create its product.
      * Because Mono is based on the ECMA and ISO standards (as is
        Portable GNU.NET, the GNU reimplementation of the CLR), and it
        is free software, and it does not use copyrighted code that
        originates at Microsoft, it can be in no danger from Microsoft
        for copyright issues.
      * Mono is a managed code runtime, application virtual machine
        environment.  It implements a virtual CPU, like Java (and PHP,
        Python and Parrot) does.  This is not a new technology with
        plenty of prior art present that can be used if it ever came
        into question.  (And recent experience shows that large groups
        of people in fact can win a patent case in this way.)
      * Mono is a stack-based application virtual machine.  This is
        still nothing new or revolutionary.
      * The C# language does a lot of things similar to Java, in a
        slightly better way.  Nothing new there.

I could go on and on; the fact remains that there is nothing that is
there that can realistically present a huge danger.  And, C# shows that
when you have all the things that Java has added to itself over the
years, but laid out in such a way that it is elegant, it is a good thing
(and it shows that Microsoft should have never entered the realm of
end-user application software nor operating systems, too).  I think the
world would be very different today if Microsoft remained solely a
programming language/interpreter/compiler factory for the last 40 years.
We'd obviously all be running operating systems in the UNIX family and
would have had a more friendly environment, I think.  But, I digress
majorly here.

My overall point is that there isn't anything to be sorry for or ashamed
of in your choice in using free software, of course.  After all, it is
free software.  And that is really my only worry: what are the license
terms and conditions?  I strongly doubt that anyone is going to come
after end-users the way SCO tried to, and SCO didn't even live long
enough to get their troll money to do that part.

	--- Mike

[0] http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing