The Mono Project, an open-source initiative sponsored by Novell, announced the availability of Moonlight 1.0, an open source project that provides Linux users access to Microsoft Silverlight content.

According to the company, Moonlight provides the platform Linux users need to use Silverlight and Windows Media content. In combination with Banshee, a Novell-sponsored project to produce an open source media player, it is part of a complete multimedia solution on Linux.

The release is available for all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu. It is in part a result of the existing technical collaboration between Microsoft and Novell that extends interoperability between Windows and Linux. Windows Media Video (.wmv), Windows Media Audio (.wma) and MP3 files are supported through the Microsoft Media Pack, a Microsoft-delivered set of media codecs that brings optimized and licensed decoders to every Linux user using Moonlight. In addition, it allows developers to write Rich Internet Applications for multiple platforms.

A pre-release of Moonlight was delivered on 19 January, 2009 to allow Linux users to stream Barack Obama's Inauguration. It was reported that over 20,000 users downloaded Moonlight to watch the Silverlight broadcast.

No financial details were disclosed.