OSNews

Although you are not allowed to read the details, this covenant apparently only covers Novell SLED customers. Not even OpenSuSe.

Virtually all Linux users, even OpenSuse users, are apparently still liable to be sued (in Microsoft's eyes) for running "Microsoft technology" ... even when Microsoft hasn't actually written any of the actual code involved.

Mono is tied to ALSA which makes it Linux only ... it does not AFAIK even support an abstraction layer such as Phonon or PulseAudio or somesuch.

There is absolutely now way to use Mono to create Silverlight content ... Mono is a "render only" technology ... it is essentially just a player.

Creation of Silverlight content remains strictly tied to Windows platforms only, and is very much a patented Microsoft dog-in-the-manger technology.

In the final analysis, everyone (other than Microsoft) is far better off using JavaFX, Flash or SVG/HTML5 (I don't really care which). All three are in a far, far better position to become platform-independent web standards than Mono/Silverlight.

Microsoft has, to the best of my knowledge, agreed to allow any user (no matter what distro) to use Moonlight+MSCodecs in any browser.

However, they do not allow anyone to use their codecs outside of Moonlight hosted within a browser.

That is the only restriction afaik.



I assume you meant Moonlight here and not Mono.

Yes, Moonlight was implemented using ALSA, but we aren't refusing patches to make it work with something else. We'd even be willing to help abstract out the audio support.

There's already a guy working to port it to Windows for use in a video game, so at some point soon he'll probably get to the point of helping us work out how to best make the audio code pluggable and abstract it out a bit.



Well, obviously... Just like there's no way to use the Silverlight browser plugin to create content

However, we are also working on development tools for creating Silverlight content on Linux (or whatever else). This project is called LunarEclipse. We'll also be integrating this with MonoDevelop once we get a bit further along.



Not at all, you can create Silverlight content on any platform today. Granted, it's /easier/ to do so on Windows using their Expression Blend tool, but you can use a text editor to write XAML and JavaScript. You can also use InkScape to create XAML.