Silverlight 1.0 RTW and Silverlight for Linux - "Moonlight"

Great Silverlight news coming out of Microsoft Press Pass

A)  " Microsoft Corp. today released to the Web (RTW) Silverlight™ 1.0, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering richer user experiences on the Web. Silverlight significantly reduces development and deployment costs and provides enhanced Web audio and video streaming and playback using industry-leading Windows Media^® Technologies. " (from the press release)

So the 1.0 version is finally out! Does this mean we might see some official Silverlight curriculum materials for uni's on the way? I'll be pushing for it! Stay tuned.

B) More excitingly, (IMHO), Microsoft have announced a partnership with open source heavyweights Novell to deliver support for Moonlight, a new version of Silverlight that will run on Linux (started on by Mono - Moonlight screenshots found here). I had heard rumours of this happening earlier, but this is the first confirmed news coming out of the Silverlight camp that such a project will go ahead. This is a big thing given that Microsoft is so often maligned for being anti-open source. It's also big news given that it's inability to operate on *nix platforms was a major factor holding back alot of prospective adopters. Interestingly, the press release doesn't really spell out what the partnership will entail, but I didn't really expect I'd see OSS oldies and Microsoftee's working together just yet, so any kind of collaboration is a good start.

Could this be a sign of more OSS collaboration to come? The company are doing alot to try to make nice with the Open Source Community, with things like this, sharing Windows source code with academics and services such as codeplex.