The jury is still out on Microsoft Silverlight — the so-called Flash killer. And the jury is downright “far out” when it comes to Silverlight on Linux, which will be accomplished by the Moonlight plugin, an open source implementation of the Silverlight framework that Novell undertook as part of its Linux partnership with Microsoft. Be that as it may, the team has announced that Moonlight 1.0 is ready and available. First the facts, courtesy of the Microsoft’s Port 25 blog (which bills itself as “Communication from the Open Source Community at Microsoft.)
Moonlight is open source, licensed under the GNU LGPL and, its makers say, is a pure C++ engine. The 1.0 version is available for all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. A Linux desktop user who visits a site using Silverlight must first download a Firefox plugin — which is much the same as users have experienced for years when visiting sites using Flash.
Moonlight is currently only available for x86 and x86-64 architectures, Ars Technica reports, but the team hasn’t ruled out support for other architectures in the future. Ars Technica states:
“The plugin does not include the proprietary codecs that are required to support Silverlight’s multimedia formats. When users visit a web page with Silverlight content that uses the codecs, a message dialog is displayed that offers to automatically download Microsoft’s media pack, which provides the proprietary codecs in binary format. It is also possible to compile Moonlight from source with ffmpeg instead of using Microsoft’s codecs. For more details, check out de Icaza’s blog entry about the Moonlight media stack. “
But the bigger issue is — does anyone care enough about Silverlight and its Linux derivative? While Silverlight has streamed some high-profile live events lately, the inauguration of U.S. President Barack Obama (some 20,000 Linux users downloaded it for that) and the 2008 Summer Olympics among them, it has hardly been shredding up the mainstream enterprise development scene. Unless Silverlight wins corporate customers, it will remain in the shadows. And in this tight economy, experts says that getting companies to buy into yet another multimedia user interface is a hard sell.
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