"I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue"

--Robert Scoble, former Microsoft evangelist

Summary: Preview of Microsoft Moonlight 2.0 is out and those covering it are mostly Microsoft fans

Information Week reminds readers that Microsoft is still attacking Linux by putting its patents inside it, e.g. FAT.

Although Microsoft asserted in a May 13, 2007, Fortune magazine article that it had concluded open source code violates 235 of its patents and the Linux kernel in particular, 42, it only claimed TomTom was infringing on three of its patents.

Raising of this issue in public may be valuable. After many years of letting FAT be absorbed everywhere Microsoft is attacking Linux using secret patents (some would maybe suggest that these are submarine patents). Technically, It's a patent ambush.

“Novell is the owner and biggest promoter of Mono, for which it acquired exclusive protection from Microsoft (due to expire in January 2012).”As an optimistic note, it seems as though Mono's grip on GNOME is being eroded. The project known as Gnote is a new GPLv3-licensed fork of Tomboy, which is the only GNOME application that brings with it a whole Mono stack to GNU/Linux distributions. Gnote is written in C++ by a gentleman whom Novell fired. Novell is the owner and biggest promoter of Mono, for which it acquired exclusive protection from Microsoft (due to expire in January 2012). As the TomTom case shows, not even "promise[s] not to sue" and de facto pseudo-standards make one safe from this aggressor's lawsuits. FAT was the equivalent of bait for a submarine patent, which is now causing great trouble to some distributors of GNU/Linux; they need to provide access to FAT-formatted USB devices, among other media.

No Lessons Learned at Novell

Microsoft bloggers are currently promoting the new release of "Microsoft Moonlight" (that's what they it), which tells us how Microsoft views the work of de Icaza. He helps Microsoft with this Mono- and Microsoft-dependent project. Gavin Clarke and his friend (partly colleague) Mary Jo Foley join others in the Microsoft crowd to celebrate the spreading of Microsoft formats on the World Wide Web. Prudent observers like Timothy who is Unix-oriented are not terribly excited. As he stated some days ago:

Microsoft challenges IBM to Websphere duel

[...]

The gauntlet was thrown down by Steven Martin, senior director of developer platform marketing at Microsoft, who launched a site called WebSphereLovesWindows to show off the results from some intricate benchmark tests that the nerds at Microsoft's labs have done to show how WebSphere on AIX iron stacks up to WebSphere running on Windows or the same application ported to C# and not using WebSphere at all, but the Windows stack.

(This site requires you to install the Microsoft equivalent to Flash, Silverlight, and I have managed thus far to avoid installing it. Because I'll give you a direct link to the PDF, which is here. Now you don't have to install Silverlight, either).

Readers also ought to watch the latest addition to this Rhythmbox/Banshee debate. The Mono team is still trying to push Banshee, which is a Mono application, into the core of Ubuntu.

2009.05.05 mrooney: I think it would be great to come into this session with a list of bug reports corresponding to any regressions of switching to Banshee, as a result of features Rhythmbox has that Banshee doesn't. It should be easier to weigh the pros and cons then, and give the Banshee developers a heads up of what would need to be implemented. Shall I create a wiki page for this spec and add this as a section?

This is part of an ongoing problem. Mono only belongs in Novell's SLE.⬆

"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