Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Mono, Linux

MindTouch: Open Source Collaboration Built on .NET

Aaron Fulkerson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:05:00 GMT

It has been a while since I last guest wrote at Port25, which is always a pleasure.

Today, I am writing about the latest MindTouch software release, codename Minneopa, which introduces three new innovative capabilities: the ability to capture and collaboratively edit video, the easy packaging of applications built on MindTouch for distribution, and the new capability to stage content.

However, if you are new to MindTouch, allow me to introduce the product. The canned statement reads as follows:

MindTouch Inc. is changing the way businesses share information, consume content, and collaborate. The company's open source platform, MindTouch 2009, combines the ease of use of a wiki with the scalability, security and integration capabilities of an enterprise portal, connecting enterprise systems, databases, web services, and Web 2.0 apps to create collaborative networks.

The gist, however, is that MindTouch offers an easy to use platform that looks a lot like a wiki, but behaves more like a portal with rapid application development capabilities. The architecture is unique and quite innovative because MindTouch is implemented in C# on .NET (or Mono) and consists of the following components:

A decoupled PHP client that provides a wiki like interface for collaboration, document management, mashups, and for creating composite and situational applications
Composition of more than 120 ReSTful web services
A web service orchestration engine
An acess control layer
An extensible HTTP message bus

To really appreciate the capabilities of MindTouch it is best to watch a demo as we' are truly defining a new category in collaboration.

This new Minneopa release of MindTouch buoy's our efforts to help those who are building collaborative networks on MindTouch. This is especially useful for developers, IT workers and business users to package their enterprise dashboards, composite applications and mashups for distribution.

For the collaborative video capabilities, we partnered with Kaltura, the developer of the world's first open source online video platform. The integration with Kaltura gives MindTouch users the built-in ability to collaborate, edit, publish and syndicate video directly within MindTouch. End users can record video and have multiple parties edit while retaining a complete version history -- all within a MindTouch page.

Download MindTouch Core, the free and open source edition that runs on Windows Server with IIS, Linux or even with a VMware virtual image, which should run in hypervisor without issue. Or download the native Windows Server version of MindTouch 2009, which is packaged in an easy to install Microsoft Installer (MSI) and supports Windows Server 2003/2008.

With the commercial edition, MindTouch 2009, users also benefit from a rich set of desktop tools, more features and a collection of adapters to popular enterprise systems and databases.

Moonlight 1.0 Hits the Street

Peter Galli — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:42:00 GMT

Moonlight 1.0 is now available.

Moonlight is an open source project that gives Linux users access to Microsoft Silverlight content, and is available for all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. This milestone release is part of the technical collaboration between Novell and Microsoft.

Microsoft has worked with the Moonlight team and Novell to enable interoperability between Windows and Linux platforms and extend the high-quality interactive Web and video experience for the benefit of the Linux community, said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division.

Microsoft has provided Novell with access to its test suites for Silverlight, and provides Linux end users of Moonlight with free access to the Microsoft Media Pack, a set of licensed media codecs for video and audio that bring optimized and licensed decoders to every Linux user using Moonlight. Windows Media Video (.wmv), Windows Media Audio (.wma) and MP3 files are supported through the Microsoft Media Pack.

A pre-release of Moonlight was made available on January 19, 2009 to allow Linux users to stream Barack Obama's Inauguration, and more than 20,000 Linux users downloaded Moonlight to watch that Silverlight broadcast.

"Microsoft Silverlight offers the most comprehensive and powerful solution for the creation and delivery of rich internet applications and media experiences, and is used by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide," Guthrie said.

For his part Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the Mono project founder and vice president of Developer Platforms at Novell, said Moonlight brings the benefits of Silverlight's popular multimedia content to Linux viewers. "This first release delivers on the goal of breaking down barriers to multimedia content and creating parity in the user's viewing experience regardless of whether the user is on Windows or Linux."

Moonlight Shines on Obama's Inauguration

Peter Galli — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 06:45:00 GMT

Microsoft and Novell joined forces this week to make sure that Linux users were able to watch the Barack Obama Official Inauguration stream with Novell's Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight 1.0.

The issue was that while the inauguration stream was fully Moonlight compatible, as the full set of Silverlight 2 codecs are in the codec pack for Moonlight, the player used managed code and the Moonlight 1 beta only supports Javascript.

The solution? Developers on Novell's Mono team sprang into action the day before the Inauguration and worked late into the night so that Linux users and those with PowerPC Macs could watch the stream with Moonlight.

This is yet another great example of how co-operation can play out to the benefit of all involved, and underscores how the advantages of the relationship between Microsoft and Novell play out in the real world.

As Ben Waggoner, the Principal Video Strategist for Silverlight, said on his blog, using managed code in the player left out Linux users of the Moonlight 1.0 beta, as well as PowerPC Mac users. "We've heard a lot of requests to add support for those platforms, and so we teamed up with the Moonlight team at Novell and they've created a Silverlight 1.0 version of the player that works great in both Moonlight and PowerPC Macs," he says.

Once the CLR/DLR is supported as part of Silverlight 2 compatibility, players like the Inauguration one will work without modification. But, that something like this could come together on such short notice is "a testament to the chops and passion of the Moonlight team and the great platform we're both implementing. I'm glad we got this chance to demonstrate how serious we are about this collaboration," he says.

For his part, Novell's Miguel de Icaza's noted on his blog that Microsoft worked late into the night to get them access to the code that was used during the inauguration so it could be tested with Moonlight.

Ars Technica also has an indepth article about how this was all turned around in a day, which is worth reading.

Two Years and Counting....

Peter Galli — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:16:00 GMT

It is two years this month since Microsoft and Novell struck their ground-breaking technical collaboration agreement, a move that has effectively ensured greater interoperability between Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

This technical collaboration has already resulted in a number of milestones, including two new offerings announced today: the availability in the first half of 2009 of an Advanced Management Pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, and a free beta download of Novell's Moonlight, a rich media application.

Some analysts, vendors and enterprises have said the company that develops effective cross-platform management tools will have an advantage and strategic differentiator over its competitors who do not. Microsoft is already doing that.

The Microsoft Operations Manger 2007 Cross Platform Extensions enable the assessment and management of Windows and Linux servers from a single, unified console, eliminating the costs and complexities of having multiple management consoles. The Advanced Management Pack extends this Linux monitoring capability.

Also, given the current tough economic environment, this solution helps reduce training costs since staff only need to be trained on one management tool for both Windows and Linux environments.

Attendees at the Microsoft TechEd EMEA conference in Barcelona earlier this month got to see a technical preview of the Advanced Management Pack, whose release will coincide with that of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

A beta of Novell's Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight, will also be released going forward as an open source plug-in for the Firefox web browser. Moonlight brings Linux-based users the same high-definition media capabilities currently available for the Windows and Apple environments.

So, expect to see a lot more solutions in the next year that promote interoperability and help ease customer pain-points across their heterogeneous environments.

Silverlight on Linux

Sam Ramji — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:45:00 GMT

For those of you who have met Miguel de Icaza, you know right away what I mean when I say that he is one of the most energetic people I’ve ever met. Clearly, the whole Moonlight team (whom I haven’t met) would also qualify for this appellation – in roughly 21 days between May and June, they collectively built an alpha implementation of Silverlight on Linux, based on many pieces of the Mono codebase.

After a great deal of work between the Moonlight and .NET teams, we’re ready to formally announce that we (Microsoft and Novell) will be bringing Silverlight to Linux, fully supported and including application and media codec compatibility.

The expansion of the existing work between Microsoft and Novell to include support for Silverlight on all Linux platforms is a major step in the journey of interoperability that we are on. We’ve heard clearly from the community that a full cross-platform web development solution is not only Windows and Macintosh, but must include Linux. I think this is a big deal. While we’ve licensed media codecs before, this represents a fully heterogeneous implementation of a strategic client technology.

Here’s to a better web and support for all users. Hopefully this will help breed further productive conversations about what developers and users need, and in someone else’s famous words, we can all “just get along.”

Cheers,

Sam