In mid-April, Microsoft announced the Silverlight plug-in as its new platform for interactive, multimedia Web content – that is as an alternative to Flash. In June, a team of developers led by Miguel de Icaza who work on Novell’s Mono project programmed a software that emulates Silverlight’s functionality without knowledge of the source code: this was the birth of Moonlight. In early September, Microsoft announced that it would be cooperating with Novell on the Linux implementation of Silverlight.

Miquel de Icaza’s employer Novell is planning to release version 1.0 of Moonlight early in 2008. De Icaza demoed Moonlight at XML 2007 in Boston and emphasized the fact that Moonlight will bring the same functionality to Linux as the Microsoft original, Silverlight.

Moonlight is part of Novell’s Mono project and will be available as Open Source. Right now, the Linux version of Silverlight is only available as a SVN version. In 2008, the Novell Mono project is planning to release packages for all major distributions via the Suse build service. Novell supports both the Mono project and the Silverlight implementation. The source code for the browser plug-ins will be open, apart from the Microsoft codecs, although they will be freely available. The source code of the developer status of Moonlight is currently available as a patchwork of multiple modules. The project page has more details.

In his blog, project developer de Icaza reports on the progress being made with Mono and Moonlight, and various demos at events. In early October de Icaza attended Remix 07 in Boston, which was hosted by Microsoft.

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