NY Times readers give thumbs down to Silverlight

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 28 May 2008 07:35

Opinion and Analysis

I've got mixed feelings about this. On one hand, the proliferation of proprietary add-ons leads to Balkanisation. On the other, if the Silverlight code had actually been incorporated into Times Reader as distributed, few people would even have noticed. Do you ever read the fine print in an application that spells out which libraries etc were used to build it?

The main point about using Times Reader rather than the NYT web site is that it collects all the day's news for you to browse at leisure. I can't help wondering whether current efforts to allow web applications to run offline couldn't be applied to this sort of situation.

If nothing else, that would help stem the quasi-religious complaints about the acceptability of software from one company or another.

But for now I suspect that if the NYT did produce a version of the Reader for Linux using Moonlight then the cries from GPL purists would be even more strident.