Moonlight hype comes from Microsoft's direction, as usual

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

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.

More disturbing details about Moonlight are unleashed

Moonlight’s cold reception was mentioned briefly just a couple of days ago, but let’s emphasise again why GNU/Linux users must not accept it; instead, they need to complaint or protest against Webmasters that adopt such ActiveX-like embrace & extend strategies. Don’t let Microsoft journalists lie to developers by saying that there is “Silverlight for Linux” because there isn’t.

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.

Not long ago the Moonlight development team announced that the Linux Silverlight adaptation was drawing ever nearer to the 1.0 release. On December 1st, the Moonlight 1.0 beta version was released.

The Novell-backed Moonlight project announced a beta of Moonlight 2.0, an open source Linux/Unix clone of Microsoft's Silverlight media framework. Moonlight 2.0 offers improved media streaming enabling media codecs like Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, and BBC Dirac, via a runtime for its sister project, .NET clone Mono.

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?