When I was at MIX and walking down the hall, I ran into a rather excited group of people that included Miguel de Icaza at the center. I stopped and listened as Miguel was running through the Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 collateral and saying things like “We’ve already got that”, “That’s a week’s worth or work”, “That won’t take too long” and so on. I realized that I was watching the formings of the Mono-Silverlight project later to be named Moonlight.
I didn’t foresee this news though!
Microsoft is going to officially endorse the Moonlight project from Novell!
Here’s what that means:
- Microsoft is listening to it’s customers and is delivering that they need when they need it.
- Moonlight, via Novell, is going to have feature parity and compatibility with Silverlight and Silverlight content will run on Moonlight with no changes. Woot! That’s going to be ensured because Microsoft is giving Novell access to the same test suites that they are running on Silverlight. That’s sweet.
- One of the large pushes on Silverlight 1.0 is HD video but it’s WMV. Guess what – Microsoft is producing codecs for the Moonlight project that are going to run on all distributions of Linux and BSD that Moonlight runs on.
- That last bullet point means that Moonlight can be distributed commercially because the video codec that they are currently using is not licensed for commercial distribution.
- Very importantly for me – I am allowed to officially as a Microsoft employee to say that Moonlight is the answer for Silverlight on Linux.
What this does not mean:
- Microsoft is not going to support Moonlight, that’s still up to Novell and the Open Source community.
Miguel de Icaza‘s post on the subject:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-05.html
This is the official press release from Microsoft:
Microsoft Delivers Silverlight 1.0, Extends Support to Linux: “Entertainment Tonight” HSN and World Wrestling Entertainment showcase new online experiences; more than 35 partners commit to Silverlight Partner Initiative.