The Mono Team abandoned development of Moonlight, a free and open-source implementation of both the Silverlight 1 and 2 runtimes. Development was discontinued in 2012 due to the poor acceptance of Silverlight and the restrictions imposed by Microsoft.
The project had been officially supported by Microsoft which, under an agreement with Novell, made not-publicly-available additional specifications, access to the Silverlight Base Class Library APIs, binary codecs and test cases available to the Mono team.
The “covenant” under which Novell was granted this exclusive access also specified conditions incompatible with the licensing that covers most free and open source software. As examples, it specifically required that the software must have been “obtained directly from Novell or through an Intermediate Recipient” and that it must be “not licensed under GPLv3 or a Similar License”. Some free software proponents criticized the covenant.
Silverlight was criticised for not living up to its cross-platform operating system compatibility promises, especially on Linux systems, compared to its extensive support on Apple and Microsoft desktops for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome. Although Microsoft was officially collaborating on the Moonlight project, Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe Systems, which sells the competing proprietary Flash platform, questioned “the commitment of Microsoft to keep the Silverlight platform compatible with other OS besides Windows“. His concerns are based on “examples from history” where he said that Microsoft had launched products with promises of ongoing cross-platform compatibility that no longer apply, for example Internet Explorer for UNIX and Windows Media Player for Mac.
