An introduction

[Vladimir Giszpenc]

On 6/27/07, Tim Newsom wrote:
> This could provide the xaml parser for use in an interface design some
> of us have spoken about.
> Separating the interface from the actual code that processes the
> events... Or that's how I understand it.
> Its a truely awesome development.

Yes it certainly could and would provide a XAML parser.  Read this
http://jacksonito.blogspot.com/2007/06/mono-developers-guide-to-writing-xaml.html
for some more details.  They are planning for tools written in
MoonLight so that you could develop on Linux or even a Mac (though I
sense no love lost on Apple products on this list :).

On 6/27/07, Hans De Croix wrote:
> Under what license exactly is silverlight/moonlight?

The Mono part of Moonlight uses the DLR. So...

"Microsoft's DLR is a layer on top of their Common Language Runtime
(CLR), which provides support for dynamically typed languages such as
Python, Ruby and JavaScript. The great news is that the DLR is
released under Microsoft's Permissive License—their way of saying open
source. Microsoft's .NET/DLR implementations of Python and Ruby, named
IronPython and IronRuby respectively, are both covered by the same
Permissive License as DLR."

Mono as a whole has this answer to the license question:
" What license or licenses are you using for the Mono Project?

We use three open source licenses:

    * The C# Compiler and tools are released under the terms of the
GNU General Public License
(http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.html) (GPL).

    * The runtime libraries are under the GNU Library GPL 2.0
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/library.html#TOC1) (LGPL 2.0).

    * The class libraries are released under the terms of the MIT X11
(http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html) license.

Both the Mono runtime and the Mono C# Compiler are also available
under a proprietary license for those who can not use the LGPL and the
GPL in their code.

For licensing details, contact mono-licensing at novell.com"


Specifically Moonlight...

"Novell will be requiring copyright assignments or contributions to be
made under the MIT X11 license to Moonlight to ensure that we can ship
this plugin with proprietary drivers if necessary (and also to
relicense Moonlight for embedded system users)."

I imagine the OpenMoko embedded system is a special case since it is
open but the license is definitely open source.


On 6/27/07, Florent THIERY wrote:
> I'd be surprised if no hardware acceleration was needed...

It is not needed though it is used if available.  They got help from
their Xgl+Compiz+Glitz guy David Reveman.

Here is Miguel de Icaza describing the development decisions some more...

"The other consideration to move away from C# to C at the time had to
do with the early conversations with David Reveman who wanted to
hardware accelerate this. The idea was to turn the Silverlight
high-level operations into a scene description that we could transfer
from the client applications directly onto the compositing manager (On
modern X installations this is what actually puts the bits on the
screen and what has enabled all those spicy effects like the rotating
cube).

The idea here is that the Silverlight client could detect if it was
running under a compositing manager that offered rendering on the
server and it would off-load all the rendering to the layer that can
talk directly to the OpenGL hardware. "

Vlad