ITWire

GNOME desktop project co-founder Miguel de Icaza, the man behind Moonlight, told the website Infoq recently that Silverlight had not gained much adoption on the web and had not become the must-have technology that he had thought it would.

Hence, he said, he had given up on the technology.

Silverlight was Microsoft's attempt to develop a Flash killer. Ultimately, it seems to have died an untimely death itself.

De Icaza is continuing to work on the Mono project that he started, to port parts of Microsoft's .NET technology to GNU/Linux.

This, de Icaza is convinced, will make people move whatever they are developing on Windows over to GNU/Linux. Thus far, there is no evidence to show that his theory is right.

De Icaza is now on his own, after Novell was taken private last year following its sale to Attachmate Corporation. Mono was one of the projects thrown out by Attachmate, who apparently saw no commercial value in it.

Mono is developed under the auspices of a new company called Xamarin which de Icaza set up after the Novell sale.

De Icaza is now focusing on developing Mono for mobile platforms, both iOS and Android. So far, there does not seem to be a great deal of excitement over what he has developed.