Moonlight, the de facto open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight platform for Linux that leverages Mono, is nearing its 3.0 release. Moonlight 2.0 was just released a half-year ago, but Moonlight 3.0 Preview 7 was just released and it's offering up more features.

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.

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

A batch of small updates on the Mono/Moonlight situation - NOVELL'S (and Microsoft's) plan with Moonlight is something that we have warned about ever since Moonlight was first announced.

AS WE POINTED out early in the week, Microsoft Moonlight is mostly promoted by the Microsoft crowd [1, 2]. This is predictable and consistent with the evidence. Novell just needs to disseminate its DNA inside GNU/Linux and then come along with Microsoft to claim special ownership of it. But who again is Novell with?

More disturbing details about Moonlight are unleashed

“It’s true that, under the terms of our agreements with Microsoft, only SUSE Linux Enterprise will be able to bundle Moonlight into the distribution”

So there you have it. You can only get Microsoft technologies when you get them from Microsoft, or from Microsoft proxies (Novell).

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.

Microsoft betrays Moonlight in the sense that suddenly it gives Intel access to Silver Lie, for Moblin