AS Mono and GNOME grow closer, so does the relationship with Moonlight. In September we found that Moonlight had been made redundant by the availability of Silverlight on Moblin, which snubbed Moonlight [1, 2]. As The Source now puts it, regarding "the future of Moonlight," it's part of a trend of doing a disservice by advancing Microsoft's proprietary software and APIs (with patents).
Miguel de Icaza has spoken on The Future of Moonlight, and it is revealing.
We could use Silverlight to build the next wave of cross-platform desktop applications.Really? We can use closed-source Silverlight to build cross-platform desktop applications? I’ve often said that a significant side effect of all the Team Mono propaganda is promoting Microsoft, and statements like this are exactly what I mean.
Here we have a clear endorsement for a closed-source, proprietary Microsoft technology with whom only Novell has any sort of “covenant” as the future for cross-platform development. In what FLOSS circles is that an acceptable proposal?
[...]
This also touches on the point I make that Team Mono / Moonlight is making no great strides for Linux. They spend a ton of effort on iPhone, Unity engine, and now PS3 and Wii? You might recall a long-winded apologetic where the argument on how beneficial Mono would be to Linux was the major selling point. Somewhere along the line that whole argument got shifted to how beneficial Mono would be to .NET developers.