Moonlight (runtime) - Moonlight in Other Distributions

Moonlight in Other Distributions

After the release of Moonlight 2, a covenant provided by Microsoft was updated to ensure that other third party distributors can distribute Moonlight without their users having to worry about getting sued over patent infringement by Microsoft. This covenant can be found on the Microsoft website.

Kevin Kofler and Tom Callaway, of Fedora, have stated publicly that the last covenant was "not acceptable" for that distribution and that "it is still not permissible in Fedora".

The version of Moonlight that was going to be available direct from Novell would have access to licensed closed source media codecs provided free of charge by Microsoft. Third-party distributions of Moonlight would only be able to play non-patent encumbered media like Vorbis, Theora and Ogg. To support other formats, the distributors would have had to choose from a few licensing options:

• Negotiate licences directly with individual media codec owners (e.g. MPEG-LA, Fraunhofer Society)
• Negotiate access to Microsoft's Media Pack as Novell have done
• Use GStreamer or a commercial codec license
• Use a hardware-specific software like VDPAU

At the PDC conference on October 13, 2008, Microsoft placed the 'Silverlight XAML Vocabulary' under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, stating in a press release, "The Silverlight XAML vocabulary specification, released under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, will better enable third-party ISVs to create products that can read and write XAML for Silverlight." Since Moonlight is essentially a XAML reader, Debian's position is that Moonlight is safe for them to redistribute (leaving each user to agree to their own licensing for Microsoft's and others' binary codecs).