On the occasion of the emergence of version 2.0 of Moonlight plugin for Firefox, Microsoft just published a new patent agreement with Novell on the open source reimplementation of Silverlight. Novell programmer Michael de Icaza announced a week ago that such a document will soon rise, and here it is. The most important provision in the agreement says that the Redmond company guarantees waive legal claims against users who use its patented technology Silverlight 3 and 4
Moonlight can play content on a Linux system implemented in Microsoft's multimedia rich Internet technology called Silverlight, as well as WMA files. Developed largely by the Novell developer tool been so far overlooked in the various Linux distributions is due to the fact that some technologies used in it are protected by patents, and existing safeguards for users of Microsoft's Moonlight and distributors were not sufficient. They referred only to users who have used the Novell software. In addition, Moonlight is based on Mono, which in an open-source is still the object of disputes and for this reason it is not taken into account, inter alia, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
It is worth noting that at any time Microsoft could pronounce the word "Covenant to End Users of Moonlight 3 and 4, protects the distributors and users of Linux. So, whether the new agreement further convince distributors to include Moonlight, show the coming weeks and months. The funded largely by Red Hat, Fedora Project software is probably still will not be used - and declared during yesterday's discussion Tom "Spot" Callaway, chief engineer for Fedora and Red Hat, developer of the corresponding legal issues Fedora. One of the reasons against the "no" is that the new guarantees do not protect the Linux distributors better than earlier.
Moonlight can play content on a Linux system implemented in Microsoft's multimedia rich Internet technology called Silverlight, as well as WMA files. Developed largely by the Novell developer tool been so far overlooked in the various Linux distributions is due to the fact that some technologies used in it are protected by patents, and existing safeguards for users of Microsoft's Moonlight and distributors were not sufficient. They referred only to users who have used the Novell software. In addition, Moonlight is based on Mono, which in an open-source is still the object of disputes and for this reason it is not taken into account, inter alia, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
It is worth noting that at any time Microsoft could pronounce the word "Covenant to End Users of Moonlight 3 and 4, protects the distributors and users of Linux. So, whether the new agreement further convince distributors to include Moonlight, show the coming weeks and months. The funded largely by Red Hat, Fedora Project software is probably still will not be used - and declared during yesterday's discussion Tom "Spot" Callaway, chief engineer for Fedora and Red Hat, developer of the corresponding legal issues Fedora. One of the reasons against the "no" is that the new guarantees do not protect the Linux distributors better than earlier.
