Silverlight can now truly live up to Microsoft's vision of delivering a cross-browser, cross-platform solution designed to power rich applications and high-quality, interactive videos, with the arrival of Moonlight 1.0. Moonlight is an open-source implementation of Silverlight for the Linux operating system, which is working its way to catch up with its Silverlight big brother tailored to Windows and Mac OS X. A joint effort by Microsoft and Novell, Moonlight is currently lagging Silverlight, which is already at version 2 since 2008, with version 3 expected by the end of 2009.“Microsoft Silverlight offers the most comprehensive and powerful solution for the creation and delivery of rich internet applications and media experiences, and is used by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide,” explained Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft Corp. “We have worked with the Moonlight team and Novell to enable interoperability between Windows and Linux platforms and extend the high-quality interactive Web and video experience for the benefit of the Linux community.”
Via the first open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight, users will be able to access Silverlight content from a range of Linux distributions. According to Novell, Moonlight 1.0 is designed to integrate seamlessly with openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu distros of Linux, namely Unix systems using the X11 windowing system. On the platforms mentioned above, users will be able to take advantage of Moonlight 1.0 plugin via Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 browsers.
“Moonlight brings the benefits of Silverlight's popular multimedia content to Linux viewers,” said Miguel de Icaza, Mono project founder and Developer Platform vice president at Novell. “This first release delivers on the goal of breaking down barriers to multimedia content and creating parity in the user's viewing experience regardless of whether the user is on Windows or Linux.”
Moonlight 1.0 for Linux is available for download here.
