The Novell led Moonlight effort to enable Microsoft Silverlight on Linux has reached its 1.0 milestone release today. I’m not surprised.
In December of 2008, Miguel de Icaza the Moonlight project lead talked to me about Moonlight 1.0 beta (which seemed complete to me) and told me that it would be finalized by the end of January 2009 (so the official release is yeaah a little later but not noticeably so).
**UPDATED** Miguel tweeted me to let me know that actual program release came out end of Jan just prior to the Obama inauguration – it just took PR time to put out the ‘official’ release.
Silverlight of course is Microsoft’s framework for rich media delivery and was widely used by NBC for delivering video content from the 2008 Summer Olympics. It was also the media framework used for the official feed of President Obama’s inauguration. Others like Major League Baseball have not been so keen on using Silverlight.
Moonlight is an interesting idea and a helpful one for Linux users that want to be enabled to view Silverlight content. The effort though still has a lot of work to do and frankly I’m looking forward to what Novell is trying to do for Moonlight version 2.0. Officially speaking the 1.0 version syncs with Silverlight 1.0 though Moonlight does have many Silverlight 2.0 media capabilities.
Moonlight 2.0 if I understand the development correctly will be more closely aligned – though we aren’t going to see Moonlight 2.0 until September of this year most likely.
Though there are many who will argue with Miguel de Icaza about the fact that Silverlight uses proprietary codecs and is the result of Novell’s collabortion with Microsoft (and thus not truly Free). The bottom line in my view is that like it or not Silverlight exists and it is used to deliver content. What Moonlight does is extend the reach of Silverlight so that it’s not limited to just MIcrosoft users and Linux users won’t be left out.
