Once upon a time, Microsoft created a great new video / audio streaming plugin called “SIlverlight”. It’s proprietary and Microsoft has lots of lawyers on retainer.
About a year ago, I announced I was refusing to support stations that -only- offered a silverlight stream
The initial solution to running streams on a Linux client that needed to play a silverlight stream was to use an open source package called “Moonlight”, which purported to provide the same capabilities. Microsoft growled enough that Fedora and others dropped the package, fearing legal problems with Microsoft with no real up side – supporting a Microsoft lookalike just encourages content producers to use Silverlight.
If you bump into a player that insists it MUST have sliverlight, you go through a bizarre maze
Clicking on that link gives a surprising outcome:
Microsoft announces that you can just click this button to get Silverlight for Linux! Shazaam! (read the wording near the bottom)
This dismal page is the ghost of the Moonlight project software, with some apparent Microsoft endorsement, and promise they wouldn’t sue, but the developers didn’t believe them and dropped the project. Downloads pretends to have something to install, but it isn’t a multimedia player, it’s a software testing tool.