Yesterday Microsoft launched Silverlight 1.0. Officially it is supported by Microsoft on Windows and Mac. So if you’re running on Linux, tough luck. Or is it?
Along the lines of what seems to be an ongoing internal disagreement on how to treat open-source, the developer division seems to be the one that opens up first – they signed a collaboration document with the Moonlight team, promising to share test suites, specification and in-depth documentation to make the Mono version of the plug-in as good as possible. There are also hints that it will be supported by Microsoft, although indirectly through Novell. Microsoft will provide the binary codecs to use with the plug-in. Novell will distribute Moonlight, as said in a recent blog post.
Moonlight is the current implementation of the Silverlight plug-in, made available by the same guys that make Mono, the .NET for Linux. Currently they also work for Novell, so an agreement with Microsoft could be at least guessed. Since it aims to dethrone Flash, the logical move would be to attack it on all platforms, but Microsoft has not released any projects for Linux (per my knowledge). But it does have a prior agreement with Novell, so this is not so unexpected.
It will be interesting to see how will the Linux version stack up against the “originals” – the Mac and Windows plug-ins. Regardless of the results this agreement remains a good sign, a sign that Microsoft can change. And allthough they have us (and most probably themselves) confused about what they’re doing, I can only hope that the developers’ division ideas on Open-Source software gains momentum and adoption inside the behemoth.
For those who want to try out the current implementation of Moonlight, you can see the build instructions here.