I'm very hopeful that Silverlight will achieve the market penetration of Flash.  Silverlight has so much going for it, like the DLR, the mini-CLR, XAML-based development, and so much more.  And like I said in an earlier post, it's a great example of people in Microsoft getting it, what with the multi-platform support.

The only thing that worried me about Silverlight was the lack of Linux support.  Like it or not, Linux is becoming a viable desktop platform, so it's important that Silverlight have some kind of Linux implementation.  I had heard somewhere that Miguel de Icaza had stated that he was going to have a Mono-based implementation of Silverlight ready by the end of 2007, but I didn't know if that was a reasonable estimate.

Somehow, I think I underestimated the Mono team.  Miguel and his band of crazy coders hammered out a more-or-less functional implementation of Silverlight, called Moonlight, in 21 days.  Holy freakin' cow, that's cool.

I'd also like to point out that Miguel mentions receiving guidance from Scott Guthrie and others in Microsoft.  I'm floored by this.  They're apparently that interested in making it succeed.