Port 25 - Communications from the open source community at Microsoft
< Back to Blogs
Moonlight 1.0 Hits the Street by Peter Galli on February 11, 2009 01:42PM

Moonlight 1.0 is now available.

Moonlight is an open source project that gives Linux users access to Microsoft Silverlight content, and is available for all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. This milestone release is part of the technical collaboration between Novell and Microsoft.

Microsoft has 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, said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division.

Microsoft has provided Novell with access to its test suites for Silverlight, and provides Linux end users of Moonlight with free access to the Microsoft Media Pack, a set of licensed media codecs for video and audio that bring optimized and licensed decoders to every Linux user using Moonlight. Windows Media Video (.wmv), Windows Media Audio (.wma) and MP3 files are supported through the Microsoft Media Pack.

A pre-release of Moonlight was made available on January 19, 2009 to allow Linux users to stream Barack Obama's Inauguration, and more than 20,000 Linux users downloaded Moonlight to watch that Silverlight broadcast.

"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," Guthrie said.

For his part Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the Mono project founder and vice president of Developer Platforms at Novell, said Moonlight brings the benefits of Silverlight's popular multimedia content to Linux viewers. "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."

 

Comments RSS
  1. fluke said:

    Scott Guthrie's group has been busy but seems to be more of a sign of Microsoft's failure to work with the community than a success.  I have been an advocate for keeping up with software updates.  For GNU/Linux distributions there is transparency with updates.  They will even go as far as to back-port fixes to maintain avoid unexpected changes in functionality unless it update also changes the distribution version number itself.  Microsoft has had a policy of using Windows Logo Compliance to help get third parties to provide a uniform user experience.  Most applications for Windows are expected to work with the standard control panel applet for uninstalling.  Despite Microsoft's attempts to vocalize a transparent set of policies, Windows Update still remains a scape-goat for breaking things.  However, in the Feb 2009 update, it appears that Scott Guthrie's group has taken steps to help earn that scapegoating.  They silently install a .Net ClickOnce add-on to Firefox and gray-out the normal method of uninstalling it.  Oddly enough, the Firefox community already had been working on a solution for .Net ClickOnce on Firefox called FFClickOnce.  This pre-existing Firefox add-on could be installed using the standard Firefox add-on options, the feedback/review system was via the standard Firefox add-on website and it uninstalled using the standard Firefox method.  Overall, FFClickOnce honored the Microsoft policy of providing a uniform user experience.  The .Net team (and by extension Microsoft Windows Update) have chosen a non-standard route for installing Firefox add-ons, information regarding the add-on does not appear anywhere on the Firefox add-on website and it refuses to honor the standard method of uninstalling.  Members of the blogging community which also use .Net developer tools where already complaining about the need to modify the Windows registry to uninstall the Microsoft ClickOnce add-on before it was even pushed out as part of Windows Update.  Those complaints seem to have been ignored by Guthrie's team.

    ---

    On the topic of Silverlight, the .Net team seems to also ignore codecs which are popular among the FOSS community such as Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, Theora and Dirac.  It also seems to provide no method for a third-party to add codecs.  In this way, Silverlight seems to be a step backwards from interoperability with existing authoring tools from the functionality that WMP provided.

    posted at 12:58PM 02/18/2009
  2. Ian M said:

    Also, +1 for OGG/Theora support (as poster "fluke" mentioned).

    posted at 07:45AM 02/19/2009
  3. AC said:

    Sorry but the handful of sites that do actually use Silverlight use 2.0 - this (the 1.0 release) may seem significant but if Microsoft is serious about SL on Linux then it needs to 'help' more. SL on Linux will always suck and a version behind the Windows version.

    Except of the PR department (and by extension this site) can talk about interop and good will all day - it doesn't fix anything.

    Just as with OWA/IE - there is a reason the "Premium mode" can only be used with IE, even though the other browser are technically far more advanced.

    posted at 03:03PM 02/21/2009
  4. Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft said:

    The beta for Silverlight 4 was released today, Scott Guthrie, a Corporate Vice President in Microsoft

    posted at 04:13PM 11/18/2009
  5. Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft said:

    In case you missed this, Moonlight 2 is now available. Moonlight is the open source Linux implementation

    posted at 06:25PM 12/18/2009

Community

Search
About Peter Galli

Peter Galli is the Open Source Community Manager for... More...

Read Peter Galli's Posts Subscribe toPeter Galli's Posts
Recent Posts by Peter Galli
 
Archive