10.31.08

Silver Lie is Still an Open-Source Lie

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 1:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Hey, Gavin, what are you doing?

AS vital background to this rant, be sure to have read previous posts about Microsoft casting Silverlight as “open source <something>” [1, 2]. It’s a distasteful attempt to market Silverlight to developers under a false premise. It’s a game of words. It’s dishonesty at its very finest.

Courtesy of Gavin from The Register, herein you can find more of that old spin about Silverlight/XAML and “open source.”

Microsoft wants open-source recruits for new model army

[...]

The company has released M, its new programming language for building textual domain-specific languages (DSLs) and software models using Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) under its Open Specification Promise (OSP).

Once again it’s Gavin Clarke who helps them manufacture these headlines (it is his pattern [1, 2, 3]). It’s not to be overlooked. Headlines matter a great deal because they enjoy a wide circulation and they make first impressions. It is rather laughable that even an infamous OSP makes its appearance again (for background, see [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]).

To make matters worse, later comes another article from Gavin Clarke and the the headline contains the phrase “Open-source Silverlight.”

Moonlight has also benefited from Microsoft’s engineering input and media work as a result of the relationship between Microsoft and Novell – the chief sponsor of Mono and Moonlight.

Thank you, Novell. Thanks for nothing. Some of the comments are worth seeing too. █

Bad Silverlight

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15 Comments

bob said,

November 2, 2008 at 4:02 am

I thought that Mono Moonlight binary and source code is licensed under the Lesser GNU General Public License version 2. Does this mean Moonlight is not open source?
freewill said,

November 2, 2008 at 6:13 am

Of course Moonlight is open-source!
Roy Schestowitz said,

November 2, 2008 at 6:34 am

Moonlight, however, is not Silverlight
Dan O'Brian said,

November 2, 2008 at 7:59 am

Actually, Moonlight is Silverlight. It is the official Silverlight implementation for Linux, as stated by Microsoft.
vincent said,

November 3, 2008 at 5:19 am

Miguel de Icaza presents the Mono project : http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC54/

He presented the tool Unity3D which allow multiplateform games.
Roy Schestowitz said,

November 3, 2008 at 5:56 am

I’d love to watch it, but it requires Mono. Microsoft still ignores my requests for a Mono patent licence and I shall soon start contacting Microsoft employees personally.
vincent said,

November 3, 2008 at 5:41 pm

Miguel de Icaza’s blog : http://tirania.org/blog/

What is your opinions on Mono Mr. Schestowitz ?
Roy Schestowitz said,

November 3, 2008 at 5:50 pm

Here are some recent posts on the subject.
Dan O'Brian said,

November 3, 2008 at 8:25 pm

You can grab the wmv and convert it to ogg and then watch it

http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/pdc08/WMV-HQ/PC54.wmv

Apparently there’s a lot of interest in Mono from the gaming industry and so Mono has now gained SIMD support (which neither Java nor Microsoft’s .NET have) because some gaming studios are starting to write their console/pc games fully in C#.

Very interesting stuff. Apparently Microsoft liked Miguel’s C# shell so much that they’ve decided to implement it in .NET for .NET 5.0 due out in 2012.

So I guess you could say Microsoft is now playing catch-up to Mono
Dan O'Brian said,

November 3, 2008 at 8:32 pm

I should add that rumors are that Miguel’s talk was so widely attended that it overflowed into a third room, which no other presentation at the conference did.
Roy Schestowitz said,

November 3, 2008 at 8:58 pm

You must be proud of your idol.
vincent said,

November 4, 2008 at 3:22 am

Why the Moonlight’s license is the GNU LGPL v2 and not the GNU LGPL v3 ?

Because of Mono’s patents ?
Roy Schestowitz said,

November 4, 2008 at 3:35 am

Moonlight requires Mono.

http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing

What license or licenses are you using for the Mono Project?

We use three open source licenses:

* The C# compiler is dual-licensed under the MIT/X11 license and the GNU General Public License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.html) (GPL).

* The tools are released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.html) (GPL).

* The runtime libraries are under the GNU Library GPL 2.0 (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/library.html#TOC1) (LGPL 2.0).

* The class libraries are released under the terms of the MIT X11 (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html) license.

You can find past discussions of this.
vincent said,

November 4, 2008 at 3:48 am

I thought that the runtime libraries of Mono were under the GNU LGPL 2.0 or later.
Roy Schestowitz said,

November 4, 2008 at 3:53 am

There have been some speculations about the choice of licences before. There’s also this comment we received hours ago (I don’t believe it’s true):

“I just heard that Novell is designing the OS for Windows 7. I live in Provo Utah and heard it from an insider that Novell is designing it w/ a flavor of Linux. I guess that M$ even admits that NT is loaded w/ security and stability issues.”

http://boycottnovell.com/2008/11/01/novl-pressures-scox/#comment-32336