14 DAY TRIAL // Miguel de Icaza, lead developer of the Mono project, has recently shared the Mono development community plans of making an experimental Linux-based Silverlight browser plug-in. He also said that the Mono team will use the documentation published by Microsoft in order to achieve this goal. Moreover, the plug-in is said to be compatible with Silverlight 1.1, currently in development.
The source code for the .NET's Dynamic Language Runtime(DLR) made available by Microsoft under a very permissive license represents a significant part of the Mono development, as this can be fully incorporated in Mono and all it would need in order to become functional are just a few compatibility fixes. Miguel de Icaza also made references to Silverlight's rather slim API, that would need some implementation, as Microsoft's intentions were to keep it to a minimum functionality.
MS Silverlight is currently available only for Windows and Mac OS X operating systems and it provides a subset of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) capabilities such as: accelerated vector-based drawing, video playback or animations. Based on the XAML runtime and later through the integration of .NET Framework, Silverlight deals XML content through a DOM (Document Object Model) interface.
However, the lack of Linux support was seen by many as a serious impediment in the widespread adoption of Silverlight. Another factor affecting Silverlight's spreading was also the lack of some cross-platform development tools. One of the good sides of Silverlight would be its support for the more flexible dynamic programming languages, such as Ruby or Python. Even though there were rumors claiming Microsoft would make it open source, Silverlgiht is and will remain proprietary software, as MS officials stated.