5. Moonlight, Microsoft and Linux

Microsoft says Silverlight will be available on Linux, but the company isn’t writing the code itself. Instead, it’s helping Novell with a Mono-based open source implementation called Moonlight that will run on all Linux distributions, supporting FireFox, Konqueror, and Opera browsers. Microsoft’s Brad Becker expects this to have all the same features as the Windows and Mac Silverlight plug-ins. “I hope they get it all. We want to be consistent on all the platforms, so Silverlight UNIX and Linux users will be able to see Silverlight content when they go to the Web. Silverlight is for everyone.” Microsoft is also providing codecs to Moonlight users, under a patent covenant that indemnifies them from suits by patent-holders like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

Moonlight runs Silverlight applications on Linux.

Moonlight has been controversial in the open source community, because of the questions about the patents on .NET and Mono, and general hostility to the patent deal Novell signed with Microsoft. As well as talking about Moonlight at MIX, Miguel de Icaza, co-founder of the GNOME project and now vice president of developer tools at Novell, offered some general comments on the issue of open source and commercial software development.

“We tried building a fully open source company. I come from that background, and we were acquired by Novell. If you want to be a software development shop not a support company, if you go with full open source you will not survive. It’s very hard to have an open source company; there are a couple of exceptions, but it’s very hard. What you need is to have a mixed strategy; you bring some open source into the company, and you have some things that you keep proprietary. Open source is like any other business strategy, like getting a loan or venture capital. Microsoft doesn’t take open source software, and I think that has damaged them, because they don’t take it and everyone else does. But they are making some software available where they see that this is advantageous to them. When your job is on the line and your paycheck is on the line, sometimes going open source is the right thing, and sometimes keeping proprietary is.”

Brad Becker, group product manager for Silverlight and Expression, hoped that all the attention being focused on Mono and Moonlight would translate into developers on Linux, Mac and Windows looking at Silverlight. “One of the advantages of being Microsoft is that when we do something bad people notice—and when we do something good people also notice. So we expect we’ll see a lot of community investment now .”