Moonlight 2 Beta catching up with Silverlight

Following a series of preview versions, the Mono Project has now released a beta of version 2.0 of Moonlight, the free Silverlight implementation. Miguel de Icaza announced the beta in a blog posting where he described the new release as "feature complete and ready for testing against Silverlight 2.0 sites".

The software, which is available to download as a Firefox plug-in, allows WMA files and multimedia content implemented using Microsoft's Silverlight to be played under Linux. Streaming is said to be substantially improved under Moonlight 2.0.

The new version, which was originally scheduled for release some months ago, aims for broad compatibility with Silverlight 2.0. Microsoft released version 3.0 of Silverlight for Windows and Mac OS X in July. De Icaza says that although Silverlight 3.0 has been released, he believes it will take some time for the new functionality and APIs to be adopted. Moonlight 2.0 is also a "slight superset" of Silverlight 2.0; the developers have implemented a selection of Silverlight 3.0 features in Moonlight 2.0 such as save dialogues and the media pipeline.

Moonlight 2.0 is mostly licensed under the GNU LGPL 2 licence, except for the Microsoft Silverlight Controls and Unit Test Framework under the MS-PL licence and some managed code and tools under an MIT licence.

(djwm)