The Novell-backed Moonlight project announced a beta of Moonlight 2.0, an open source Linux/Unix clone of Microsoft's Silverlight media framework. Moonlight 2.0 offers improved media streaming enabling media codecs like Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, and BBC Dirac, via a runtime for its sister project, .NET clone Mono.

In another “not quite Windows Live but still cool” post, Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems, is now available in both Silverlight v1.o and 2.0 builds. Silverlight, while it still has a long way to go to become as widely adapted as Adobe’s Flash, is leading the charge for Microsoft to become a more open eco-system for development.

Moonlight 3.0, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet plug-in software on Linux and Unix platforms, is now being offered in an alpha release, according to Web pages from the Mono project, which has jurisdiction over Moonlight. The release features infrastructural capabilities designed to move Moonlight closer to the capabilities of Silverlight 3, said Novell, which sponsors Mono.

Novell has released Moonlight 2.0, a major update to its open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application framework. The new version introduces support for managed code and the DLR.

"Not too long ago, I shared my thoughts on Microsoft's introduction of Silverlight, their blatant lack of Linux support and how they were aiming at regaining their browser dominance. Well, it looks like the open source crowd has picked up the pieces again with a solution to conquer what ails the common Linux user. Silverlight, meet Moonlight. "

The other day, Novell's Mono Project, announced the beta release of Moonlight 2. IN theory, this enables Linux users to watch Microsoft Silverlight encoded content. Of course, that begs the question: "What Silverlight content?"

The open-source Mono project will show off an early version of Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in running on Linux later this week. Work on the plug-in, called Moonlight, was started only in May, after Microsoft's Mix conference. Moonlight uses version 1.1 of Silverlight, a browser plug-in for displaying interactive Web applications, which is due in the fall.

While betas of Microsoft's Silverlight 3 platform have been available for a number of months after being announced in the last half of 2008, their free software implementation of Silverlight, which is known as Moonlight and developed largely by Novell with the Mono developers, has lagged behind.

If you're like me, you don't like proprietary video and audio codecs. Be that as it may, some sites, like NBC's Olympics site, use Microsoft's proprietary Silverlight streaming technology. Until recently, if you were using Linux that meant you couldn't watch videos from these sites at all. Until now.