GPL and Silverlight games in courses

Re: GPL and Silverlight games in courses

by Michael Enders -
Number of replies: 1

Certainly Riastats.com  is one source.  (for silverlight and Flash penetration) and for Linux usage

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-200906-201005-bar

and here

http://w3counter.com/globalstats.php

Silverlight is not going anywhere and neither is its support.  Moonlight has lagged behind but its not as if there is no attempt at  getting it up to speed so silverlight is not strictly closed.  The OP to my understanding is focused on games with a tie in to moodle. I am curious though . What open source platform presently creates modern games in any reasonable productive environment since people here look down on flash and silverlight.     I mean the compliance argument is all well and good but its just entirely overboard to me to now claim that it addresses every programming need.  I will openly admit that i have no plans to move over all my  game programming complete with logic to HTML5.  Anyway heres a balanced article on the subject for those sucking the Kool aid a bit too hard.

 http://gizmodo.com/5461711/giz-explains-why-html5-isnt-going-to-save-the-internet

And yes. As long as Flash is around the same arguments can be made for silverlight. Why Am I into this discussion? because I am in a simliar position to the OP toying with the idea of using the tremendous opportunities to learn that games have and in tying it to a system such as Moodle to create  ar richerr and more enjoyable learning experience. Haven't fully decided whether to do that in Silverlight or Flash but having worked with both realize that Silverlight IS a solid alternative to Flash . Also must admit nothing quite compares to visual studio but thats a  less important point.

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In reply to Michael Enders

Re: GPL and Silverlight games in courses

by Matt Bury -
Picture of Plugin developers
Ooh, I can't resist a good forum debate!

On the open source front, Actionscript and Flash are open source. Adobe freely distributes the Flash/Flex SDK and there are some respectable 3rd party open source IDEs to produce Flash apps. The only parts that Adobe haven't made open source are Flash Player and their Flash and Flex IDEs, understandably.

There appear to be some inconsistencies: I hear a lot about how closed Flash is but nobody seems to say the same of PDF, also owned by Adobe and also open sourced by them. Adobe seems to benefit enormously by opening their platforms to third parties and work closely with them, in marked contrast to Apple and Microsoft. I believe that this is one of the reasons for their and Google's successes.

As a web developer, I welcome HTML5, I love open source and I hope that one day, we'll all be on a variety of open source, cross-compatible OS's. I'd wait and see what happens with the WebM video CODEC (actually On's VP8 CODEC - Flash introduced On VP6 with Flash Player 7). Google have put their considerable weight behind it but it has legal issues, mainly being that it's too similar to other closed source CODECs. So far only Google and therefore Firefox and Opera are saying that they'll support it. That leaves Apple and Microsoft which ship with Safari and IE and most users never change their browsers and IE8 has abysmal HTML5 support.

Then there's Apple's rather disingenuous attempts to promote HTML5, which is actually to promote Apple's lock-in business model: http://theflashblog.com/?p=2069

As a Flash developer, I look forward to the day when advertisers stop targeting Flash Player to deliver the most annoying elements on the web. HTML5'll be just as annoying and persistent and take some of the stigma off of Flash Player. It'd also be nice to have the web video thing handled by HTML and not Flash, leaving Flash to do what it does best; fast, dynamic, media-rich, communicative, OOP, full-blown web apps. Most people haven't seen what Flash is capable of and how much faster and more versatile than Javascript, JSON, etc. it is.

I also believe that the internet is the most significant development in our history since the printing press and that it holds great potential for connecting and unifying us, giving minorities a voice, establishing public consensus and encouraging political engagement without homogenising us.
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