The first one is about the cooperation between Novell and Microsoft on Mono’s Moonlight (Silverlight implementation on top of Mono). The « announcement » can be read on Miguel’s blog : http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-05.html . Miguel had already given some hints about a big announcement on #mono yesterday but refused to tell more so here it is . On a personal note (and since I don’t use Silverlight) I have mixed feelings about that announcement.

It seems to me that, like OOXML, Microsoft is trying to make partners in order to spread his patented technology with low efforts. I already though that Moonlight was a waste of effort (if Microsoft really wants to make their Silverlight a good and credible product they have to make it portable themselves) and, as I already said there, it proves again the dependency link that Mono is slowly acquiring on Microsoft technologies and, IMHO, it’s a pity. Moreover everybody knows that Novell isn’t really high regarded since the Microsoft-Novell patent deal and I’m pretty sure that this announcement won’t make Novell looks any better for most people who will think it’s yet another betrayal.

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The other big news is about the upcoming, completely revamped, ATI Linux Driver ! Indeed, after boring their users with the « One Bug A Day Keeps AIGLX Away »-type releases, the announced rework of the driver internals is finally included in the main development branch.

To have complete information and coverage on what this driver 8.41 (and the releases after it) brings to Linux (*big* performances improvements, R600 support, AIGLX …) I advise you to read the Phoronix in-depth preview : http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=821&num=1 and their benchmarks.

EDIT : AMD even announced that they will release specifications and code skeleton to allow the development of completly free drivers starting from the R500 chipset (which is the chipset that Avivo mostly targets). Really big kudos to AMD for these achievements ! link : http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/