Microsoft has already taken Silverlight to version 2, but only for Windows and Mac OS X platforms. When it comes to the Linux operating system, Silverlight compatibility is not Microsoft’s responsibility, as the project was adopted by Novell. And, while on Windows and Mac OS Silverlight is at version 2, with v3 promised for 2009, on Linux development moves at a slower pace. However, the first Beta of Moonlight (as the open source implementation of Silverlight is labeled) is just around the corner.

At the start of November, “we branched Moonlight for the 1.0 release, full with the licensed Microsoft Codecs, and started our release process for Moonlight Beta 1 to be available in the next few days,” revealed Miguel de Icaza, Novell vice president for Developer Technologies. “The Moonlight engine team has now resumed our work on Moonlight 2.0, the version that will track Silverlight 2.0.”

Both Microsoft and Novell failed to deliver a deadline for the availability of the free beta of the Moonlight rich media application. However, the companies indicated that Moonlight was a direct result of the partnership signed back in 2006. In fact, Moonlight Beta is applauded as an integral part of the two year anniversary of the Microsoft and Novell agreement. As far as the Silverlight version developed by the Redmond giant goes, statistics indicate that it is already installed on more than one in four computers worldwide.

“While the GUI team was busy completing 1.0, the Mono core team has been working on the security framework for Moonlight, the networking stack (Silverlight allows Socket connections using policy files) and web services (System.ServiceModel, a subset of WCF). The security system is the trickier and is the one that has received the most attention. We started early on last year in to implementing this, as we knew it would end up burning a lot of cycles to get it right,” de Icaza added.

Novel Moonlight 1.0 and 2.0 Alpha are available for download here.