Mono business at Kodak?

Summary: Interesting little moves around 'Microsoft as a standard'

ONE month ago we saw a bizarre investment in Kodak which came from Bill Gates' bank account. Prior to the TomTom lawsuit over FAT, said one reader of ours: “this is almost certainly his [Gates’] move to start squeezing some proprietary substitute for JPEG and RAW formats into consumer devices.

“Wait too long on this and all your family photos will need Bill’s permission to be copied, viewed, printed or edited.”“You’ll notice that the solid state storage devices used in the cameras use Bill’s patented, designed to lose data filesystem rather than one that has wear leveling and other advances needed to work reliably on solid state.

“Wait too long on this and all your family photos will need Bill’s permission to be copied, viewed, printed or edited. Even then it will only be available in digital form on Bill’s cruftware.”

The Gates-perceived DRM or HD format come to mind here, but watch this new press release about Kodak and "LINUX". At the bottom is states that:

LINUX distributions which are fully supported (user interface requires Mono Version 1.26 or higher): SUSE 10.1+ FEDORA 8+ UBUNTU 6.06+

Why Mono? We've learned some more about this in the IRC channel, but here is an interesting message from Jose X, who is no friend of Mono because it's a Microsoft-imposed patent risk.

I went to sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=254045&package_id=310902&release_id=663754 and downloaded the only version there (1.11). The sourceforge main project page and the inside of the tarball indicate that this is a *Qt* project with *no mono* [educated guess]. The copyrights seem to belong to Eastman Kodak Company. I also found what appeared like a changelog timestamp for Feb 23, 2009.

So this seems like the right project and seems fresh.

Yet the press release states at the bottom that the gui requires mono 1.26 [BTW, I went to see the file out of curiosity to see if it might be worthwhile to consider reimplementing it in something like Qt.]

Did I.. did someone make a mistake?

Is Kodak getting "paid" to advertize mono?

Has Microsoft stooped to this level? They have to pay organizations to pretend they use MSware or "clones"?

In other related news, Novell continues to be used as a promoter of Microsoft's Silverlight, as seen in this new article.

Silverlight is currently in version 2.0, and Microsoft has recruited help from other companies, notably Novell, which developed a Linux version of the technology called Moonlight.

Novell gives the false illusion that Silverlight is cross platform. It is not. Fortunately, Silverlight is a failed technology after years in the market. Microsoft literally pays some companies just to adopt it and such strategies are hardly sustainable especially because Microsoft is near debt (or already in it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]). ⬆

"There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers."

--Bob Muglia, Microsoft President