Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 12th Feb 2009 08:05 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
Mono Project Novell's Miguel de Icaza has announced on his blog that Moonlight has hit the 1.0 milestone. Moonlight is the open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight technology, a framework similar to Adobe's Flash. Silverlight has already been used during the Olympic Games and President Obama's inauguration for streaming those events across the internet.
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jstedfast
Member since:
2007-06-21

Moonlight is a lot more than just a way to play videos on the web.

While Silverlight 1.0 is just a simple canvas for 2D graphics, Silverlight 2.0 introduces a bunch of controls (known as Widgets in the Linux world) for RIA development. Things like TextBoxes, Scrollbars, Comboboxes, Listboxes, etc combined with the ability to write web apps in any language that can compile to IL (of which there are many).

Since Microsoft has already provided the codecs, they can't just take them back - besides, even if they could, Moonlight could just add support for GStreamer (we'd like to do this anyway) and then users would be able to get legal codecs from Fluendo. Or, if you don't live in a country where patents are a problem, you can simply build Moonlight with FFMpeg support (which is already possible w/o any need for patches).

We used the Microsoft codecs that they offered because it was the easiest way for Moonlight users to get free legal video decoders. We couldn't legally ship Moonlight built against FFMpeg.

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Matzon Member since:
2005-07-06

We used the Microsoft codecs that they offered because it was the easiest way for Moonlight users to get free legal video decoders. We couldn't legally ship Moonlight built against FFMpeg.


So, at no point, when the license for the binary plugs were given to Novell only, did you Hmm?

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jstedfast Member since:
2007-06-21

They weren't given to Novell only, they were given to all Linux users, no matter what distribution they run.

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miguel Member since:
2005-07-27

"We used the Microsoft codecs that they offered because it was the easiest way for Moonlight users to get free legal video decoders. We couldn't legally ship Moonlight built against FFMpeg.


So, at no point, when the license for the binary plugs were given to Novell only, did you Hmm?
"


The binary plugins actually come from Microsoft and can be used by any Linux distribution (and we go out of our way to test it on as many systems and distributions as we can).

Miguel.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3