No Worries Of Patent Infringement - Moonlight 2.0 Safe

Patents in the USA

Microsoft came out with the technology called Silverlight.  It's a browser plugin kind of like flash but allows one to run Silverlight applications in the browser.  The idea is that there could one day be a series of browser based applications made by Microsoft that anyone in any browser on Windows or Mac can use.  Like usual Linux users were left out.

What came out to compensate for Silverlight was an open source project called Moonlight that is being developed by Novell.  This has very much the same functionalities of Silverlight and works on Linux operating systems as well as others who man choose the open source versions over Microsoft's version.

There have been potential legal battles over this because of patenting issues.  Many feared that Microsoft would come after Moonlight especially those distributing Moonlight.  This is always a concern when these potential patent issues are questioned in people's mind.  This makes it difficult to go ahead an adopt new technology of this nature.

Moonlight 2.0 is being developed and Microsoft has announced that they promise to not go over Moonlight 2.0 or those who distribute the plugin.  This takes the potential patent issues off the table.  Microsoft says they are dedicated to this version and are hoping for Moonlight 3.0 to succeed as well.

What Microsoft has to gain from this is that if many people adopt the platform, Microsoft can potentially position themselves in front of a large audience as in every internet user to sell applications to.  It's best for them to keep the platform open so that future sales can be made.  If you shut off Linux users, you also shut off any potential profits.

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