Look at the URL:

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

“A page to track the various projects that make up the Mono-based implementation of Silverlight.”

@Dan: indeed, the actual output – Flash, Silverlight, whatever, is relatively unimportant.

What is crucial is that there need to be free software apps for *creating* the content, not just passively consuming it. Inkscape is one app, LunarEclipse is another.

I personally wish that there was a decent free software tool which did SVG + animation. It looks like we’re a long way from that, though.

Here’s my theory:

Only Novell can deliver Moonlight (as defined by the product Novell is implementing + the Microsoft codec binary blob) because Microsoft only gave Novell the right to redistribute the binary blob and it comes with a number of other restrictions as well.

There’s nothing that suggests that distributions could not ship Moonlight sans binary codec blob that I’ve seen.

Of course, for distributions to do so, they would have to link with, say, ffmpeg to make it feature-complete and by doing so put themselves at legal risk unless they also licensed the video formats (from Microsoft and MPEG) because the video formats are patented.

AFAICT, the risk of other patents applying to Silverlight should be fairly minimal because there’s nothing that Silverlight does that does not have “prior art” written all over it (e.g. 2D vector graphics, gee wiz, SVG maybe? Same with the XAML format – SVG or GladeXML = prior art).

If Microsoft have patents on Silverlight’s 2D vector graphics, then it is just as likely that Cairo infringes – and Cairo is a core part of the Linux Desktop (and actually, afaik, Moonlight uses Cairo for drawing anyway).

We can live without Mono because we have popular frameworks like Java. It’s not the same with Samba.

Also see:

http://boycottnovell.com/2008/03/09/samba-microsoft-eu-tricks/

In terms of protocols, HTTP or TCP/IP are commodity protocols: they are well-known and used in the marketplace, but there are also many different products which implement them. Cars are commodity items in the same way; different people buy different cars for different reasons, but at a basic level they all do the same thing. X86 processors are also commodity.

Exchange’s protocols are very much not commodity; they are de-facto as you rightly point out, and while some people have licensed the information to use them they’re not replaceable in the market place.

Indeed, there isn’t really such as thing as “Exchange protocol” anyway. In terms of authentication, you have exactly the same Active Directory/Kerberos setup, which Samba already provides. The IPC mechanism is the same, and it uses the AD tree, and then provides a MAPI API to access actual data.

“It made them hard to bypass” doesn’t fit with the definition I use, so I suspect we’re talking at cross purposes somewhat.

Microsoft didn’t commoditise these protocols in any way.

it seems like a drop-in replacement for Exchange, which is designed to work with existing software. That’s not the same thing as Mono. Here you have protocols that Microsoft commoditised.

Is Samba /actively/ being used to build things, like Novell builds a lot of the desktop with Mono (unlike Mainsoft for example)?

Samba is entirely about the API. Samba 4 is built out of API descriptions (idl files) and can be used to build things (e.g., OpenChange).

Mono is no different to GNU Portable.net, gcj, etc.

Here is one difference. One is an API, used to build things. The others are specific implementations. Two specific bad apples (for arguments sake let’s assume) vs. the rotting poison that creates bad apples.

That’s an oversimplification of one of the major differences.

Have a look at this excellent analysis from MattD. It also includes the Mono promises.

The Novell/Microsoft Deal Dissected

Also, of interest you might find the following:

Dissecting Microsoft’s OOXML/ODF Strategy

Mindmap: Microsoft Deals and Partnership as Proxies in a Software Battle

Or is it that Novell owns the copyright of Mono, and now has perceived clearance from Microsoft to use Mono, that makes this different from other Free implementations of proprietary standards?

Forgive my ignorance/stupidity Almost a year after the deal I still don’t understand a lot of the ramifications of it.

Have a look at this:

And There You Have It: You Need Novell (Not Just .NET) to Run Moonlight

While Linux thrives in the sharing of work, Novell seems to be Monopolosing (pun) Mono. Since Novell is claimed to have received special ‘protection’ for “Mono”, I firmly believe that it would be wise to disengage and exclude it from other GNU/Linux distributions. While Jeff Waugh has insisted that GNOME is in no way Mono-dependent, a friend of mine who is a former Fedora maintainer begs to differ, even after hearing Jeff’s rebuttal to my posts.