Silverlight On the Way To Linux

Posted by timothy on Thursday November 20, 2008 @11:39PM from the howl-at-the-moonlight dept.

Afforess writes "For the past two years Microsoft and Novell have been working on the 'Moonlight' project. It is a runtime library for websites that run Silverlight. It should allow PCs running Linux to view sites that use Siverlight. Betanews reports 'In the next stage of what has turned out to be a more successful project than even its creators envisioned, the public beta of Moonlight — a runtime library for Linux supporting sites that expect Silverlight — is expected within days.' Moonlight 2.0 is already in the works."

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Re:Why Is Porting Needed? by cnettel · 2008-11-21 00:17 · Score: 5, Informative

A few things: you cannot write a (Mozilla) browser plugin all in managed code, there is simply no interface. You at least need a bridge. Silverlight is also related to WPF/Avalon, which has a native component on Windows. Most importantly, though: Silverlight is not open source. Moonlight is. It is not a port, it is a sanctioned, but independent, rewrite, which is also related to advances in the Mono support for quite a few things that weren't there 2 years ago.