"Novell announced this week the official release of Moonlight 2,
a new version of the company's open source implementation of
Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application framework.
Moonlight 2 is compatible with content that is designed for
Silverlight 2, but it also includes support for a number of
features from Silverlight 3.
"Launched in 2007 by Novell's Mono team, the Moonlight project
is developing a Firefox plugin for Linux that can render
Silverlight media. Microsoft has endorsed the effort and supports
it by supplying licensed codecs and test cases to help ensure that
Moonlight properly conforms with the Silverlight specifications.
The plugin is distributed as open source, except for the
proprietary codecs which are obtained automatically by the
plugin.
"Moonlight 1.0, which was released earlier this year, delivered
compatibility with Silverlight 1.0. The new release—which has
been under development for roughly ten months—introduces a
number of very significant features, including support for managed
code and the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). The DLR, which
Microsoft released under an open source license in 2007, makes it
possible to use .NET variants of Python and Ruby in Silverlight and
Moonlight."
