Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1 Nears Rollout, Calls for 2.0 Contributors

by Kristin Shoemaker - Nov. 10, 2008Comments (3)

The Moonlight team has announced that the first beta release of Moonlight 1.0 is nearly ready for testing. Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight product.

The project hopes to get new contributors to come aboard as it finalizes the 1.0 release and pushes forward to Moonlight 2.0. Developer Chris Toshok points to some of the upcoming development tasks, and says that because the 2.0 release will be larger and features numerous self-contained subsystems, developers have more opportunity to make a solid impact on the project.

Moonlight is part of the Mono development framework. Because Mono is a cross-platform, open set of .NET development tools, there are some important contributor guidelines that must be considered (mainly to keep developers and the project out of any situations where the ownership of contributed code could even be remotely legally questionable).

Moonlight in its current state is licensed under the GNU LGPL. However, as Toshok said, the 2.0 release is going to be far more feature-rich, and use the LGPL and MIT X11 licenses. Media codecs will be licensed by Microsoft explicitly for use with Moonlight.

Moonlight currently has a few issues to work through before the beta 1 release, but it has passed Microsoft's Silverlight tests, and works consistently with a core list of test sites utilizing Silverlight. It does have a few issues with Firefox 3, but these also seem to occur in Windows-powered machines using Silverlight with Firefox 3.

It seems Moonlight is edging ever closer to the first project goal: running Silverlight applications in Linux. The project hopes to eventually make a software developer kit available to build Silverlight applications in Linux, and reuse the engine it builds to enable desktop applications.


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3 Comments
 

Waste of time... Microsoft should be doing this, not Novell if they want developers to buy in the platform and make it a credible alternative to Flash.


0 Votes

So... what the anonymous poster above is saying is that he'd happily use a proprietary version of Silverlight for Linux written by Microsoft but wouldn't run an free software version written by Novell with guidance from Microsoft?


Is he for real??


I guess he must not be a free software enthusiast.


0 Votes

What a nerve. Novell not only poisons GNU/Linux with Microsoft junk but not it's also "Call[ing] for 2.0 Contributors". Yes, free labour to help ruin the Web with XAML..


0 Votes
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