As Silverlight goes, the performance under Linux is pretty bad. As in infinitely bad. As in it doesn't exist. Yeah, okay, there's Moonlight, but it's at least a full version behind. Most stuff I've tried simply doesn't work under Moonlight at all. And it's not exactly open source, so it's not like it could be ported to another Unix. I don't think that there's a Silverlight for Solaris, for example.

Politically and emotionally, I don't want Microsoft to succeed in any way. Part of this is just based on my antagonistic attitude towards them, but that is based on how underhanded they've been with their "Embrace and Extend" attacks.

Paranoically, I have no idea what it's doing. I think that in part it implements BITS, AKA "Please waste my bandwidth". I have no idea why I'd want to let that infect my computer.