Moonlight brings Silverlight to Linux

Alastair Otter

Alastair Otter is a senior journalist at MyBroadband, and focuses on software and hardware. He has a particular love for Open Source Software (OSS)...

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The Novell-backed Mono project yesterday formally announced the release of  Moonlight, an open source version of Microsoft’s Silverlight rich media technology.

Silverlight, Microsoft’s equivalent of Flash for playing rich media over the Intenernet, is still in the early stages of its development and is still a long way off making a dent in Adobe’s Flash uptake.

One of Silverlight’s downfalls to date has been that there isn’t a Linux implementation of the software – at least not from Microsoft. Moonlight is that implementation for Linux, built by open source project Mono.

Moonlight was undertaken by Novell as part of an agreement with Microsoft and with the support of Microsoft.

The release announced yesterday was Moonlight 1.0 which is compatible with Silverlight 1.0-enabled sites and is downloadable as a Firefox plugin. Moonlight 1.0 runs on most popular Linux desktops including SuSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu.

The one drawback with Moonlight, however, is that it’s development process is well behind that of Microsoft – Silverlight 2.0 is already available – which means that many sites that are Silverlight 2.0-enabled are still innacessible to Linux users. The Mono team is already working on Moonlight 2.0 and rudimentary versions are available.

Microsoft has been campaigning hard to get Silverlight into the mainstream among computer users and to date the technology has been used by major networks covering the Olympic Games and streaming President Obama’s inauguration.

Silverlight discussion