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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Member since:2005-07-06
From what I read, the license is Given first and foremost to Novell:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx
Secondly to and "resellers, recipients, and distributors to the extent they are authorized (directly or indirectly) by Novell or its Subsidiaries"
Love this part: "... that run only as a plug-in to a browser on a Personal Computer and are not licensed under GPLv3". So... Moonlight - with the media pack, must be run from a browser. wtf!?
Edited 2009-02-12 17:15 UTC
Member since:2007-06-21
That applies to Microsoft's codecs. Moonlight itself can be distributed (and redistributed) without problems.
If/when a user navigates to a website that needs the codecs (and hasn't been built against ffmpeg), Moonlight will ask the user if he or she would like to download/install Microsoft's codec blob (directly from Microsoft).
They cannot redistribute those codecs, but it doesn't matter because Moonlight will simply download/install them for the next user.
Member since:2005-07-27
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx
Secondly to and "resellers, recipients, and distributors to the extent they are authorized (directly or indirectly) by Novell or its Subsidiaries"
Love this part: "... that run only as a plug-in to a browser on a Personal Computer and are not licensed under GPLv3". So... Moonlight - with the media pack, must be run from a browser. wtf!?
Correct. Microsoft is willing to provide free codecs to Linux users as long as they are used with Moonlight.
To get an idea of the cost of these codecs, you can look at Fluendo's own codec pack, that goes for 28 euros per machine. It seems reasonable that Microsoft would choose to only distribute the codecs that they have licensed from MPEGLA and Fraunhofer for use in Moonlight and not to solve Linux's media problems for us.
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.