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.

I noticed a comment thread on Groklaw about Moonlight, with a link to the license terms on Microsoft's website. They call it Covenant to Downstream Recipients of Moonlight - Microsoft & Novell Interoperability Collaboration . A comment by Microsoft's Brian Goldfarb on Dana Blankenhorn's article about Novell being a lead pony for Silverlight started the discussion originally.

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?"

Microsoft only produces the Silverlight runtime for Windows and OS X, leaving Linux support to Novell's Mono project, which produces Moonlight. Mono developers argue that Mono is not chasing tail lights, but in the case of Moonlight it very clearly is.

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.

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.

The new version of Moonlight is out, and with it, an expanded patent covenant enabling any Linux user to run Novell's open source Silverlight implementation.

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.

In the same vein, if Novell and Microsoft call it "Microsoft Moonlight", does it make Moonlight developers de facto Microsoft employees?