"...Proprietary technologies give more control and power to the software vendors, while Open technologies (like the Open Web) give more freedom to the users. By promoting proprietary technologies, Adobe and Microsoft are trying to squeeze more value from the developers and pass it over to their shareholders.

In another “not quite Windows Live but still cool” post, Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems, is now available in both Silverlight v1.o and 2.0 builds. Silverlight, while it still has a long way to go to become as widely adapted as Adobe’s Flash, is leading the charge for Microsoft to become a more open eco-system for development.

When I first looked at Moonlight, Novell’s open-source version of Microsoft’s Sliverlight, I liked it, but I didn’t really see much of a point to it. Silverlight, Microsoft’s latest answer to Adobe Flash, isn’t used in many sites. What I liked the most about Silverlight was that it provided a fully legal way to access WMV and WMA (Windows Media Video and Audio) from Linux.

I had previously pointed out that the lack of supported platforms was a serious problem for Silverlight, especially when compared to Flash. The root of the problem was that Moonlight, the Linux version of Silverlight, is usually at least one release behind the Windows and mac versions of Silverlight. This caused confusion for developers as it was not clear which features would work on Linux.

The media wrongly presents Silverlight as "cross-platform" and falls for Microsoft's open source marketing ploy

Adobe has announced today the public availability of an Adobe AIR alpha release for Linux. Although the alpha is not feature-complete, it is already capable of running some mainstream AIR applications and is robust enough to facilitate AIR development on the Linux platform.

Microsoft is playing games with SIlverlight at what seems like two tiers, in order to spur adoption (along with platform+vendor lock-in).

HTML 5, a groundbreaking upgrade to the prominent Web presentation specification, could become a game-changer in Web application development, one that might even make obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.

There have been quite a few Moblin related announcements these last weeks: The release of the final version of Moblin 2.0, the Moblin Garage and the preview release of Moblin 2.1. More interesting is the news released by Microsoft's Silverlight team that they will develop Silverlight 3 for Moblin.