Microsoft is releasing a new edition of Office to businesses this Wednesday and for the first time it’s adding free versions online versions of MS Word and other programs that work in a Web browser. It’s expected that these free apps will have fewer features than the desktop versions.

MS Office 2010 marks a milestone in the company’s efforts to stay abreast with an shift within the software industry that moves away from programs running locally on computers to free services that can be accessed from any browser over the Internet. Microsoft must walk a fine line and be careful not to make the free applications too appealing as to impact its lucrative software business negatively.
Software accounted for 29 percent of Microsoft’s revenue and 51 percent of its operating income in the most recent quarter.

In contrast to it’s competitor, 4 percent of companies use Google Apps today, according to Forrester Research.

In addition, the Outlook e-mail program will be able to pull in information from users’ outside social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. It also adds new features to tame the ever-growing number of messages in the inbox, including a way to group all replies to a single thread under one line.

One of the intricate aspects of open source software is in implementing support — where it is even possible to do so — for the wide realm of codecs, formats, and a plethora of proprietary technologies that users have come to rely on. One such technology is Microsoft’s Silverlight framework, which until early this year was not available to Linux users.

This changed in January, when the first version of the Moonlight Project was released, providing Linux users with Open Source Silverlight support. Also included, provided that Moonlight has been obtained via Novell and meets certain other conditions, is a license to Microsoft’s free but closed-source Media Pack, containing codecs needed to decode audio and video streams.
With Silverlight 1.0 support out of the way, Moonlight developers began on Silverlight 2, and late last week, delivered the results of that effort with the release of Moonlight 2. The new release implements — as the version number suggests — support for Silverlight 2, complete with a new patent agreement from Microsoft that clarifies the applicability of the commitment to Moonlight implementations obtained from sources other than Novell. Users are now protected from patent litigation without regard to who supplied a user’s version of Moonlight — use of the Microsoft Media Pack, however, continues to be restricted to versions of Moonlight provided by Novell.

In addition to support for Silverlight 2, the release implements a select number of features from Silverlight 3 — complete support is expected in Moonlight 3, a preview of which is to be released in the coming months, and after a brief interim, version 4. New features include: “support for Bitmap APIs, file dialogs, easing functions, pluggable media pipeline and custom Codecs, better streaming of multimedia content based on the quality of the user’s connections and this release embeds Mono runtime functionality, which allows developers to target Linux with rich Internet applications using a wide variety of programming languages, including C#, Ruby, Python and Javascript.”

Moonlight — and Mono in general — has not been without its share of controversy, however. The conditions placed by Microsoft on Moonlight use produced considerable confusion regarding its status — prompting the revised commitment included with Moonlight 2 — as did the restrictions regarding eligibility to use the Microsoft Media Pack. As one might expect, those who oppose the use of closed-source software entirely object to the need for proprietary codecs. Some have objected to the patent agreement between Novell and Microsoft on principle, while others believe the project is part of a conspiracy to undermine the Open Source community.

Moonlight 2 — including a license for the Microsoft Multimedia Pack — can be downloaded from the Mono Project’s Moonlight site. Additional information about Moonlight and the Mono project is available from the Mono Project website, as is information for those interested in joining in the project’s development.