An introduction

[Vladimir Giszpenc]

It looks like Gmail swallowed my last response so let me try again...

On 6/27/07, Hans De Croix <decroix.hans at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Under what license exactly is silverlight/moonlight?

"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."

"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.

On 6/27/07, Florent THIERY <fthiery at gmail.com> 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. "

Regards,

Vlad

FYI  I am just a lowly Mono consumer (if you are generous you could
say QA)  I am neither associated with Mono or Novell directly so it is
always better to check with the actual source.