Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight web application platform. It’s built on top of Mono, the open source .Net project. What’s unbelievably cool is that a group of Mono hackers spent the better part of last month heads-down, creating a substantial portion of the Silverlight implementation from scratch:
The past 21 days have been some of the most intense hacking days that I have ever had and the same goes for my team that worked 12 to 16 hours per day every single day –including weekends– to implement Silverlight for Linux in record time. We call this effort Moonlight.
Needless to say, we believe that Silverlight is a fantastic development platform, and its .NET-based version is incredibly interesting and as Linux/Unix users we wanted to both get access to content produced with it and to use Linux as our developer platform for Silverlight-powered web sites.
There isn’t a browser plugin yet, but you can download the source tree from the Moonlight project page and contribute to the effort.
Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days – Link
Moonlight Project Page – Link
2 thoughts on “Moonlight: Silverlight for Linux”
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The opensource community needs to be careful with this little trojan.
Its great to hear the silverlight runtime/framework is being reverse engineered. This is paramount to the continued establishment of the philosophy presented by the open source community.
Silverlight display’s Microsoft realisation that operating systems are no longer essential commodity to runtime monopolization. You don’t need microsoft products for future “most common” distributed applications. Especially considering the vast majority of enterprise desires SOA architecture.
To return to my point, it IS good to understand silverlight. That being said, it should be seen as strictly educational and with all other regards, dismissed.
Open source can create a better implementation equivical to flash and silverlight. Its core philosophy will be therefore remain as common, leaving corporate equivanents as variants of the norm.
Neither flash nor silverlight is established completely. As an AS3 developer I know it is becoming more accepted through the great work macromedia/adobe have commited to their implementation and it is THIS time where opensource has an opportunity to ensure runtime monopolisation does not repeat itself as is the case with operating systems.
The microsoft and adobe guys are most undoubtadly excellent engineers however they do remain vassels of their corporate entities – do not therefore rely on their credibility to ensure a best software runtime in the interests of the public more generally.
opensource NEEDS**** its own implementation.