| Midnight Moonlight hacking delivers 3D Obama |
Feb. 11, 2009
 Officially, Novell announced the release of Moonlight 1.0 today. The real release, though, happened nearly three weeks ago, after some intensive, late-night, pre-inauguration hacking, explains GNOME and Mono Founder Miguel de Icaza in this exclusive mini-interview.
Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight multimedia player technology. Using codecs contributed by Microsoft, the project has created a player and browser plug-in that seem to work quite well, based on limited testing by DesktopLinux.
Microsoft "reaches out"
As Miguel tells the story, he and Aaron Bockover, who heads up the popular Banshee media player project, were at the Cineplex on Jan. 21, the evening before the Presidential inauguration. They were actually in separate theaters, though -- Miguel was settling in for the four-hour version of "Che", and planning to stick around for the Q/A with Benicio del Toro scheduled for after the movie. Bockover was in the next theater over, where Waltz with Bashir" was about to begin.
It was Bockover who first saw the message from Microsoft, relayed by Joseph Hill at Novell. Miguel said. "I think it was something like, 'Your country needs you,'" he chuckled.
"Microsoft reached out to us that night," Miguel added. "They said, 'We're getting a lot of requests for the Linux Silverlight player,' and they wondered if we could push out a release."
Novell already had a beta of Moonlight 1.0, and so Aaron headed straight for the office, rousting out other developers on the integration team on the way. Miguel added, a bit guiltily, "I had a friend with me at the movie, but I joined them there after the movie."
That's okay, Miguel. Trusting your team is a good thing.
Miguel said that when he finally did arrive at the office, he found the team grappling with a couple of stubborn wrinkles. "The public beta had a couple of bugs we couldn't work around. And we had to decide whether to push the beta out as an official release. We had to make this call at 2AM, with no time to get PR or marketing involved."
Ah. That explains why Novell only got around to announcing the release today.
Miguel continued, "Eventually, we decided that because of the inauguration, we had to push 1.0 out. We finally did it, at around 4 AM in the morning."
A tipping point?
And how was the release received? "Between 4AM and the inauguration, we had about 20,000 downloads. And then we had another 8,000 during the inauguration itself."
Many of the initial requests and subsequent downloads may have been associated with a Microsoft press release stating that the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) had "selected Silverlight" as the official web streaming technology for the inauguration. (PIC's current website seems to use the competing and more widely supported Adobe Flash technology, though). Other users may have been interested in experiencing CNN's 3D "photosynth" depiction of Obama's inauguration, which Miguel describes as "beautiful, beautiful." (Photosynth aims to let users "synthesize" 3D worlds from multiple photos -- in this case taken and submitted to CNN by inauguration attendees).
Some tech journalists called CNN's use of Silverlight a "tipping point" for the technology, because many PC users downloaded the plugin for the first time that day. Miguel sees a different kind of tipping point.
He said, "I'm impressed with the level of cooperation we've had from Microsoft. All along, they have been going out of their way to give us every spec, and every access to engineers. They are actually helping us with an open source project. That is pretty amazing, compared to how things have gone in the past."
Helpful, perhaps. Selfless, no way
Clearly it's in Microsoft's best interests to make sure Silverlight is supported widely. Ubiquitous support will help its multimedia creation tools compete with Adobe's Content Creation Suite 3. The CCS3 tools mainly create content for Adobe's free Flash player, which enjoys incredible saturation in the PC market. It wasn't until the arrival of Flash 10 last year that Linux gained version and release-date parity with other OSes, however.
Currently, for Linux users, despite Miguel's team's heroic efforts, Silverlight support remains one release behind. We asked Miguel when Moonlight might support Silverlight 2.0 (which was used to broadcast the Olympics, for example).
Miguel replied, "Moonlight 2.0 has been incredibly challenging, because there are hundreds of components, and a lot of them had to be developed "blind," since the others weren't done yet, either. It's hard to just get a button on the screen. But it all came together a week and a half ago -- we finally got all the pieces in place. We plan to preview Moonlight 2.0 at the MIX Conference, a Microsoft web developer conference."
Meanwhile, Microsoft plans to announce Silverlight 3.0 at MIX, so it may be a while before Linux becomes an equal Silverlight citizen.
In Novell's official press release, Miguel stated, "This first release delivers on the goal of breaking down barriers to multimedia content and creating parity in the viewing experience, regardless of whether on Windows or Linux."
More details about Moonlight, including an easy-to-install Firefox plugin, can be found here, and on Miguel's blog, here. Also, don't miss our previous chat with Miguel about Moonlight and the recent Mono 2.0 release, here.
-- Henry Kingman
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