The first beta release of Moonlight 1.0, an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight framework, is now available for download from the project's official web site. This release is the first step towards bringing robust Silverlight compatibility to the Linux desktop.

Development on Moonlight began last year after Microsoft demonstrated Silverlight at MIX 07. Lead Mono developer Miguel de Icaza and his team produced a working Moonlight prototype after an intense 20-day hackathon during which the enthusiastic participants produced thousands of lines of code. When Silverlight 1.0 was officially released in September, Microsoft announced plans to collaborate with Novell's Moonlight developers in order to ensure full Silverlight support on the Linux platform. Microsoft supplied test suites and also agreed to make binary audio and video codecs available for the Linux plugin.