PeterRecently, Microsoft released Silverlight, a media platform designed to compete with Flash. Microsoft announced that the Silverlight browser plugin would be available for both Windows and Mac OS X users for various different browsers.
With no promise or news of Linux support for Silverlight, some developers on the Mono project (which is a project to build a free software implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework for Linux and other platforms) set about on project Moonlight, to build a Silverlight implementation for Linux.
In just 21 days, they've managed to implement an absolutely amazing amount of Microsoft Silverlight considering the time they had. One of the people working on this was Miguel de Icaza, who made a post on his blog:
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.
I think this is a great example of what the open source community and development model can do when it is working at its best and it looks very promising that us Linux users will have some way to enjoy most of any Silverlight-based content and sites when they do start popping up.
You can look at the progress they made in the form of screenshots on the relevant page on the Mono site. You can also see the main project page for Moonlight.
