Plug Pulled On Open Source ‘Moonlight` Project

Novell and its partners have pulled the plug and abandoned support for the Moonlight project, the open source version of Microsoft’s Silverlight rich Internet application plug-in technology, according to a founder of the project.

In an interview with InfoQ, Miguel de Icaza, a well-known open source developer and CTO of Xamarin, announced that support for Moonlight has been abandoned.

“We have abandoned Moonlight,” de Icaza said in the published interview.

Silverlight Implementation

According to the Moonlight website, Moonlight is an open source implementation of Silverlight, primarily for Linux and other Unix/X11 based operating systems. In September of 2007, Microsoft and Novell announced a technical collaboration that included access to Microsoft’s test suites for Silverlight and the distribution of a Media Pack for Linux users that will contain licensed media codecs for video and audio.

Moonlight came out of the Mono project, an open source development platform based on the .NET framework that de Icaza started at a company called Ximian (formerly Helix Code) in 2001. De Icaza then took Mono to Novell – which acquired Ximian in 2003 – where he further nurtured the project and launched Moonlight.

However, as Microsoft has signaled its intent to downplay Silverlight in future development scenarios, interest in pursuing Moonlight also waned.

“Silverlight has not gained much adoption on the web, so it did not become the must-have technology that I thought would have to become,” de Icaza told InfoQ. “And Microsoft added artificial restrictions to Silverlight that made it useless for desktop programming.”

Microsoft Limitations

Added de Icaza:

“These days we no longer believe that Silverlight is a suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology, there are just too many limitations for it to be useful. These days we believe that in the C# world the best option is to split the code along the lines of the presentation layer. The user would reuse a core part of their application across all platforms, and write a new UI specifically for each platform they target: iOS with MonoTouch, Android with MonoDroid, Mac with MonoMac, Windows with WPF or Winforms or Mac, Web with ASP.NET and Windows and Linux with Gtk

“It is not write-once-run-everywhere, but the result are applications that can exploit the native facilities and create native experiences on each platform.”

According to the Moonlight website the goals of the project were to:

• To run Silverlight applications on Linux
• To provide a Linux SDK to build Silverlight applications
• To reuse the Silverlight engine we have built for desktop applications

Microsoft released the latest version of Silverlight on 8 May. Version 5.1 is a minor update that features performance, reliability and security improvements.

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