Novell Delivers Moonlight 1.0 for Rich Media on Linux

by Sam Dean - Feb. 11, 2009Comments (5)

During both the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics and President Obama's inauguration, many Linux users were seriously miffed that Microsoft's Silverlight rich application plug-in was required for viewing. Today, the Mono Project, one of Novell's open source initiatives, has announced the availability of the Moonlight 1.0 Firefox extension, which is an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Linux and Unix platforms. According to Novell: "Moonlight provides the platform Linux users need to use Silverlight and Windows Media content. In combination with Banshee, a Novell-sponsored project to produce an open source media player, Moonlight is part of a complete multimedia solution on Linux." Some questions are being raised about Moonlight's license, though.

Moonlight is available for all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu. Novell's announcement included input from Microsoft:

"Microsoft Silverlight offers the most comprehensive and powerful solution for the creation and delivery of Rich Internet Applications and media experiences, and is used by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide,” said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft Corp. “We have worked with the Moonlight team and Novell to enable interoperability between Windows and Linux platforms and extend the high-quality interactive Web and video experience for the benefit of the Linux community.”

There are two benefits for Linux users here. One is that a whole lot of video and audio content on the web is in Windows Media Video (.wmv) or Windows Media Audio (.wma) format. Moonlight comes with a Microsoft Media Pack, which is essentially a set of codecs optimized for Linux users to work with these and other formats. Moonlight also has tools for developers to write Rich Internet Applications.

Driver and codec incompatibility remain pesky problems for many Linux users, and many of the complaints that I see crop up surround trying to work with multimedia. On this front, Moonlight is good news. However, BoycottNovell is raising some issues about whether Moonlight can truly be considered free, since it is licensed under the LGPL 2, but Novell reportedly includes the following restriction in its licensing terms:

"We consider non-LGPL use instances where you use this on an embedded system where the end user is not able to upgrade the Moonlight installation or distribution that is part of you product (Section 6 and 7). You would have to obtain a commercial license from Novell."

"This would, for example, prohibit Moonlight from being distributed on immutable systems such as a LiveCD, since the software on such a medium cannot be updated in place by the recipient," writes Boycott Novell. It remains to be seen what restrictions Novell may impose as Moonlight spreads out, but I'm still betting that this is a step forward for Linux compatibility with a lot of online content.

A totally free, open, Esperanto approach to media playback online is the best bet for Moonlight. The remaining question will be how open to Moonlight content providers and Microsoft will be. We've already seen Microsoft force people to use Silverlight many times, but there is a new player in town.

 

 


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5 Comments
 

Boycott Novell knows fully well that they are spreading lies. They never let the facts get in the way of smearing anything related to Mono and Moonlight.


Distribution of Moonlight on a LiveCD is perfectly fine, this was discussed on comp.os.linux.advocacy.


In fact, here is a LiveCD that you can burn, redistribute and give to all of your friends and they can in turn do the same:


ftp://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/livecd/


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> Boycott Novell knows fully well that they are spreading lies.


No, *that* is a lie, Miguel.


Why would we say false things? Read the comments over there. It's being justified.


Best wishes,


Roy


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Thanks Sam Dean


Elazığ - Elazığ Haber


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"Boycott Novell knows fully well that they are spreading lies."


How's this for a lie?


We consider non-LGPL use instances where you use this on an embedded system


I consider that assertion to be nonsense.


But the real question is ... why is this totally redundant and misleading clause so important to Novell?


Could it be that they're using Moonlight's license as a means of promoting Microsoft's proprietary software (codecs), and that part of the .Net "deal" with Microsoft is that Novell must takes steps to ensure those codecs are "pushed" to Moonlight users?


On immutable systems, systems which the LGPL has no problem with, this marketing (and Free Software infection) ploy wouldn't really work, as those codecs couldn't be installed.


Yes, things are very clear now, aren't they?


I'm not sure what I find more sickening ... Microsoft's usual Mafia tactics, or certain supposedly Free Software developers betraying their own community to help Microsoft infect Free Software.


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> We consider non-LGPL use instances where you use this on an embedded system


> I consider that assertion to be nonsense.


That is of course your prerogative. Thankfully (for all our sake) your opinion is nonsense too.


> But the real question is ... why is this totally redundant and misleading clause so important to Novell?


1) it's not redundant, as it's a clarification to those embedded vendors (or any vendor, really) who might be seeking to use moonlight and who can't fulfill the terms of the LGPL. In those cases, we can (as copyright owners) offer different license terms.


A brief word about codecs: First, as people have said many, many times, moonlight is not just codecs. Also, try doing some research here. The MS codecs were the only way we could legally distribute codecs at *all*, without paying a *lot* of money to MPEG-LA, and charging people for moonlight. This should be seen as the coup that it is by linux users. I can't believe it's causing such a flap. All of you people who have been gleefully using illegal installs of codecs (probably thinking "oh, we're really sticking it to the man) can now use blessed codecs, and you're raising a huge stink about it? Come on, really?


2) how on earth is it misleading? We're the copyright holders, we can apply whatever license terms we *want*. the LGPL does not bind us to any sort of behavior. It states nothing about what we are or are not allowed to do. It merely offers rights to you (to modify/redistribute/etc), and also codifies the rights *you* have to provide if you redistribute it.


I can see you getting all frothy-at-the-mouth over some suspected "deal", but you don't have to look very far to see the same licensing stuff on other projects.


Nothing, absolutely nothing regarding the license terms for moonlight is anything other than proper and accepted (I might even call it relatively common) practice.


You guys are like Rumsfeld, constantly proclaiming that the WMD's are just around the corner, and if we just turn over this one more rock we'll find them. Might want to look elsewhere, though.


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