In Microsoft's announcement today that it had released Silverlight 1.0 to the Web, the company lavished special attention on Novell's continuing efforts to extend Silverlight (Microsoft's Flash killer) to the Linux platform via its Mono project. Obviously this is one of those non-announcements announcements if you're a Linux and open source fan, as Novell has not yet created anything you could consider an installable package.

Still, I applaud Microsoft for actually positioning Linux prominently within its release, and I tip my hat to Novell not just for porting Silverlight to Linux and beyond, but for bringing the .NET framework to Linux. Certainly .NET (as with most Microsoft technologies) is antithetical to open source, but consider for a moment the size of the .NET development community and power behind its VAR and ISV ecosystem. Moving beyond simple "compatibility" with .NET on the server side will only further solidify Linux as the platform of choice for heterogeneous enterprise environments where J2EE and .NET often play, albeit somewhat uncomfortably at the moment.