Another timely explanation of the Silverlight/Olympics effect on GNU/Linux

I had previously pointed out that the lack of supported platforms was a serious problem for Silverlight, especially when compared to Flash. The root of the problem was that Moonlight, the Linux version of Silverlight, is usually at least one release behind the Windows and mac versions of Silverlight. This caused confusion for developers as it was not clear which features would work on Linux.

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.

"In this announcement, a sentence has been ruffling a few feathers at Adobe and Microsoft: «Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web.

The media wrongly presents Silverlight as "cross-platform" and falls for Microsoft's open source marketing ploy

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.

"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. "

There have been quite a few Moblin related announcements these last weeks: The release of the final version of Moblin 2.0, the Moblin Garage and the preview release of Moblin 2.1. More interesting is the news released by Microsoft's Silverlight team that they will develop Silverlight 3 for Moblin.

Open source Silverlight clone gets new milestone release as it races towards feature parity with Microsoft.