Oh my, it seems there may be a new Moonlight Covenant coming:

Updated Patent Covenant
We worked with Microsoft to make sure that Moonlight was available to everyone on Linux and BSD.

Culturally, we started on two opposite ends of the software licensing spectrum. The covenant that was issued for Moonlight 1 and 2 covered every user that used Moonlight, but only as long as the user obtained Moonlight from Novell. This is a model similar to how Flash is distributed: there is a well-known location where you get your plugin.

The open source world does not work that way though. In the open source world, the idea is to release source code and have distributions play the role of editors and curators and distribute their own versions of the software.

Microsoft’s intention was to expand the reach of Silverlight, but the original covenant was not a good cultural fit. We worked with the team at Microsoft (Brian Goldfarb and Bob Muglia’s teams) to make sure that the covenant would cover the other Linux distributions.

The new patent covenant ensures that other third party distributions can distribute Moonlight without their users fearing of getting sued over patent infringement by Microsoft.

There is one important difference between the version of Moonlight that will be available from Novell and the version that you will get from your distribution: the version obtained from Novell will have access to licensed media codecs.

Third party distributions of Moonlight will be able to play unencumbered media using Vorbis, Theora and Ogg inside Moonlight (and Silverlight), but for playing back other formats, they will have a few options:

  • Negotiating directly with the media codec owners a license (MPEG-LA, Fraunhofer).
  • Negotiate access to Microsoft’s Media Pack with Microsoft.
  • Plug-in GStreamer or another commercial codec license into their Moonlight implementations.

If this is true – it will lessen one major complaint I have had with Moonlight, that Moonlight is anti-community. It can only lessen it because I notice that we still have Novell-only access to codecs. I can not support the idea that Open Source software can be “Company X Only”. Sorry.

Also, this is very good spin from Mr. de Icaza, and I mean that. The man has had a real problem in the past making announcements and this one is quite well done. A little media training of late?

A small note

I like this line in the post:

Moonlight 2 is the result of love and passion to bring the Silverlight runtime to Linux.

It has always struck me as odd that anti-Free Software people are so obviously emotionally tied up in what they are doing, yet love to call pro-Free Software people “zealots” and so on and so forth.

Just a funny thing to me, I guess.

Small confessions

I suspected but didn’t know: Mr. de Icaza is under an NDA with Microsoft.

Microsoft’s DRM will never come Linux, which I think would render most of the desirable Silverlight sites worthless. (Are there any desirable Silverlight sites?) Doesn’t this undermine virtually all commercial media-delivery Silverlight sites? Or, down the road are we going to have Novell-only DRM support?

Predictions

Here are my predictions, based on the last similar situation when Mono fell under the “promise” from Microsoft:

  1. The new covenant will not be as comprehensive as Mr. de Icaza states. I do think he isn’t overselling this one near as much as the last one, which I think points to a lesson learned.
  2. Team Mono will rail on and on about how this is a win for them and should “silence the critics”, never noting the incovenient fact that they promoted Moonlight just as hard without the “proper” coverage, and there are still remaining issues.
  3. There will still be at least 3 obvious problems with the “Covenant” and a half-dozen subtle and complicated problems.