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Guest Post: Adventures in Novell's Moonlight

I installed the 64-bit version of the Moonlight plugin for Firefox, and tested it on the following listed test site:



http://www.mason-zimbler.com/festivegreetings/

I was subsequently greeted by a dialogue box entitled "Moonlight Codecs Installer":



Would you like to install the required add-on to play the content of this page?

This page requires the Microsoft Media Pack to be installed to play multimedia content.

If you choose, the software will be automatically downloaded and installed from Microsoft's web site.

[] Do not ask me to install this add-on again

[Cancel] [Install Codecs]


Clicking on "Install Codecs" results in this the following message being displayed:






End User License Agreement

Before the required software can be installed, you must first agree to the End User License Agreement below.

MICROSOFT PRE-RELEASE SOFTWARE LICENSE TERMS

MICROSOFT MEDIA PACK 1.0

ONLY FOR USE WITH NOVELL'S MOONLIGHT 1.0 RUNNING IN AN INTERNET BROWSER

These license terms are an agreement between Microsoft Corporation (or based on where you live, one of its affiliates) and you. Please read them. They apply to the software named above, which includes the media on which you received it, if any. The terms also apply to any Microsoft

- Updates (including but not limited to bug fixes, patches, updates, upgrades, enhancements, new versions, and successors to the software, collectively called "Updates"), - supplements, - Internet-based services, and - support services

for this software, unless other terms accompany those items. If so, those terms apply.

By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the software.

If you comply with these license terms, you have the rights below.

1. INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS. You may install and use any number of copies of the software only with the software identified above running in an Internet browser on a personal computer.

2. TERM. The term of this agreement is until the commercial release of Novell’s Moonlight 1.0 but in no event later than June 1, 2009.

3. PRE-RELEASE SOFTWARE. This software is a pre-release version. It may not work the way a final version of the software will. We may change it for the final, commercial version. We also may not release a commercial version.

4. FEEDBACK. If you give feedback about the software to Microsoft, you give to Microsoft, without charge, the right to use, share and commercialize your feedback in any way and for any purpose. You also give to third parties, without charge, any patent rights needed for their products, technologies and services to use or interface with any specific parts of a Microsoft software or service that includes the feedback. You will not give feedback that is subject to a license that requires Microsoft to license its software or documentation to third parties because we include your feedback in them. These rights survive this agreement.

5. SCOPE OF LICENSE. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. You also may not - work around any technical limitations in the software; - reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, except and only to the extent that applicable law expressly permits, despite this limitation; - publish the software for others to copy; - rent, lease or lend the software; or - transfer the software or this agreement to any third party.

6. NOTICE ABOUT VC-1 VISUAL STANDARDS. This software may include VC-1 visual decoding technology. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:

THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE VC-1 PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSES FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (A) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE VC-1 STANDARD ("VC-1 VIDEO") OR (B) DECODE VC-1 VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE VC-1 VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE.

If you have questions about the VC-1 visual standard, please contact MPEG LA, L.L.C., 250 Steele Street, Suite 300, Denver Colorado 80206; http://www.mpegla.com

7. EXPORT RESTRICTIONS. The software is subject to United States export laws and regulations. You must comply with all domestic and international export laws and regulations that apply to the software. These laws include restrictions on destinations, end users and end use. For additional information, see www.microsoft.com/exporting

8. SUPPORT SERVICES. Because this software is "as is," we may not provide support services for it.

9. ENTIRE AGREEMENT. This agreement, and the terms for supplements, Updates, Internet-based services and support services that you use, are the entire agreement for the software and support services.

10. APPLICABLE LAW.

a. United States. If you acquired the software in the United States, Washington state law governs the interpretation of this agreement and applies to claims for breach of it, regardless of conflict of laws principles. The laws of the state where you live govern all other claims, including claims under state consumer protection laws, unfair competition laws, and in tort.

b. Outside the United States. If you acquired the software in any other country, the laws of that country apply.

11. LEGAL EFFECT. This agreement describes certain legal rights. You may have other rights under the laws of your country. You may also have rights with respect to the party from whom you acquired the software. This agreement does not change your rights under the laws of your country if the laws of your country do not permit it to do so.

12. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY. The software is licensed "as-is." You bear the risk of using it. Microsoft gives no express warranties, guarantees or conditions. You may have additional consumer rights under your local laws which this agreement cannot change. To the extent permitted under your local laws, Microsoft excludes the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

13. LIMITATION ON AND EXCLUSION OF REMEDIES AND DAMAGES. You can recover from Microsoft and its suppliers only direct damages up to U.S. $5.00. You cannot recover any other damages, including consequential, lost profits, special, indirect or incidental damages.

This limitation applies to

- anything related to the software, services, content (including code) on third party Internet sites, or third party programs; and - claims for breach of contract, breach of warranty, guarantee or condition, strict liability, negligence, or other tort to the extent permitted by applicable law.

It also applies even if Microsoft knew or should have known about the possibility of the damages. The above limitation or exclusion may not apply to you because your country may not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental, consequential or other damages.





I don't agree with this EULA, therefore I can't install this software.

To resolve this problem, I downloaded the sources for Moonlight:

svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/moon





The license for this software is as follows (from moon/LICENSE):

* Moonlight source code (src/, plugin/)

Unless explicitly stated, this code is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL 2 license only (no "later versions").



Why isn't Moonlight licensed under GPLv3?

In addition to the GNU LGPL, this code is available for relicensing for non-LGPL use, contact Novell for details (mono@novell.com).

We consider non-LGPL use instances where you use this on an embedded system where the end user is not able to upgrade the Moonlight installation or distribution that is part of your product (Section 6 and 7), you would have to obtain a commercial license from Novell (consider software burned into a ROM, systems where end users would not be able to upgrade, an embedded console, a game console that imposes limitations on the distribution and access to the code, a phone platform that prevents end users from upgrading Moonlight).


This seems to preclude distributing Moonlight on a LiveCD or other immutable medium, which seems like a rather odd restriction.

I then tried to build Moonlight by following the instructions given in the link you provided:

Download and install the moon tarball or moon SVN module from SVN:

* configure like this: ./configure * Build and install, run: make && make install * To install the plugin in your home: make test-plugin





moon]$ ./configure bash: ./configure: No such file or directory



I notice you now use an autogen script, so I assume the above information is now out of date. Perhaps you could update that page to reflect this change.

After manually resolving difficulties with missing build dependencies (expat-devel, firefox-devel), I then proceeded with the build, but encountered this error:

"application.cpp:18:37: mono/metadata/appdomain.h: No such file or directory"





And the build failed.

So I installed the following to meet this missing dependency (including sub-dependants):




mono-core, mono-devel, mono-data, mono-winforms, mono-web



And tried again, but encountered yet another error:




checking for MONO... configure: error: Package requirements (mono >= 2.2) were not met:

Requested 'mono >= 2.2' but version of Mono is 1.2.5.1



After checking "./configure --help" for clues, I discovered that I needed to disable managed code to remove this dependency, so I tried again with the "--with-managed=no" flag set, but I still received exactly the same error.




application.cpp:18:37: error: mono/metadata/appdomain.h: No such file or directory



Even though this file does exist:




/usr/include/mono-1.0/mono/metadata/appdomain.h



At this point, I'm basically stuck.

So the question is, how do I, or anyone else who wishes to only use Free Software, view the contents of that Web page?

Also, when can I expect to see a prebuilt package of Moonlight, built against Free Software codecs rather than Microsoft's proprietary software, in my distro's repo?

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