Microsoft Support
Shortly after the first demo at MIX 07 in Paris, Microsoft began cooperating with Novell to help the building of Moonlight. Support includes exclusive access given to Novell for the following Silverlight artifacts:
- Microsoft's Test suites for Silverlight,
- Silverlight specification details, beyond those available on the web,
- Proprietary codecs made available free-of-charge for Windows Media Video and Audio, for VC-1 and MP3, and in the future H.264 and AAC, only licensed for use with Moonlight when running in a web browser. Other potential decoders include GStreamer and FFmpeg (used during the development stage) but Novell will not provide prepackaged versions of Moonlight with those libraries, because those decoders have not been granted licensing for the use of patented codec technologies.
Microsoft has released two public covenants not to sue for the infringement of its patents when using Moonlight. The first one covered Moonlight 1 and 2, is quite restrictive and it covered only the use of Moonlight as a plugin in a browser, only implementations that are not GPLv3 licensed, and only if the Moonlight implementation has been obtained from Novell. It also notes that Microsoft may rescind these usage rights.
The second covenant is an updated and broader covenant that no longer limits the covenant to users that obtain Moonlight from Novell, it covers any uses of Moonlight regardless of where it was obtained. The updated covenant covers the implementations as shipped by Novell for versions 3 and 4, it no longer distinguishes Novell from other distributions of Moonlight and expands the covenant to desktop applications created with Moonlight. The covenant does not extend to forks licensed under the GNU GPL (Moonlight itself uses the Lesser GPLv2).
Read more about this topic: Moonlight (runtime)
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