10.04.09
Microsoft Interjects Itself into Free Software Using Novell
Summary: A roundup of new cases where Microsoft imposes its presence and dependency using its people at Novell
AS mentioned in the previous post, Jason from the Mono-Nono Web site was unimpressed by this latest Mono promotion from Novell. Along the lines of the epic “Got Milk?” slogan, Novell’s marketing team publishes “Got Mono?”
Also discussed was the upcoming Monospace Conference on October 27 – 30 in Austin, Texas. The conference teaches .NET software developers and organizations how to use the Mono framework and Microsoft .NET to leverage existing investments in skills and applications on a broader array of platforms for a broader array of opportunities.
Here is another new post from Miguel de Icaza, who currently endorses a site that attacks Boycott Novell (Miguel also says that Richard Stallman is “misinformed since he refuses to use the web”).
As usual, I will be talking about Mono. But since Mono is an giant universe, I would like to know what the audience would like to hear about.
He carries on ignoring the technical/legal problems and as the Mono-Nono Web site correctly points out, there is no real comment on the betrayal of Novell and Moonlight (due to Moblin [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]).
I’m just wondering when Team Mono is going to comment on Microsoft bringing Silverlight to Moblin?
Moblin’s likelihood of software patents is a real issue and Silver Lie’s inclusion is not good news to GNU/Linux. As Groklaw put it, “may I ask why *you* would want a proprietary, binary-only app on your Linux?”
The Novell employee who created and maintains Tomboy has announced version 1.0 of this principal Mono injection vector and Novell exploits SUSE’s mainframe domination to spread Mono into more servers along with Microsoft software.
It seems simple: The recently released Mono Extension of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 allows Microsoft Visual Studio users to generate SUSE Linux versions of their Windows applications that run on ASP.NET.
Not just mainframe servers are being infiltrated by Microsoft. Web servers too (Apache to be precise [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17]) have Microsoft push its proprietary software into them. This new post from a Microsoft employee shows how Microsoft pushes its own stuff into Apache, just as observers warned from the very start.
What we’ve done is a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Channel for AMQP. Our goal is to provide a first class AMQP experience for the .NET developer. And, since this is an Apache project we’re talking about, all our code is obviously open source.
DotNetNuke, a Microsoft-esque ‘ripoff’ of PHP-Nuke, is another case of countering LAMP servers. Like Novell, DotNetNuke received a special place at Microsoft’s table (the CodePlex Foundation [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]). Amid some changes at the top come the following comments from Groklaw, regarding this article which is titled “Microsoft’s CodePlex Foundation leader soaks in stinging critique.”
“Behind the scenes (private correspondence) we already see how Groklaw is being smeared for its criticism of Miguel and Mono.”Pamela Jones writes: “Let me guess. After that, we will be favored with Gartner reports on how the GPL is no longer the most popular license; rather Microsoft’s “OSI approved” licenses are now the most popular. And so Microsoft takes one more step toward its announced goal, that FOSS applications run on Windows instead of the Linux kernel. Miguel is serving on the board of this foundation. Get the message?”
There is also Black Duck Software, which is derived from Microsoft to privately track software licences and funnel in everything from CodePlex as it already does. This trajectory was long coming [1, 2]. Regarding another article about the CodePlex Foundation, Jones writes: “Let me speculate: the business challenge of how to pretend to be open source without actually playing by the rules? Remember the old joke? How many Microsoft employees does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None. Microsoft redefines Darkness (TM) to be the new industry standard..”
Behind the scenes (private correspondence) we already see how Groklaw is being smeared for its criticism of Miguel and Mono. Some of the smears are more public and Miguel’s friend Jeff Waugh calls me a “motherfucker” in support of an attack site which “faux” 'open source' people have created against Boycott Novell. Their attempt at a shotgun wedding with Microsoft/proprietary software is not working out.
Going back to the issue at hand, there is also the LiMo/Samsung phone which needs to be avoided because it's part of a software patents racket. Fortunately, as the following new article implies, LiMo gets its behind kicked by Android, so this Microsoft-taxed phone from Samsung is unlikely to gain much traction.
The idea of an open source software platform for mobile devices hasn’t made much commercial headway yet – as sales for Google’s Android system attest – but Samsung Electronics is about to give it a try.
Samsung’s deal with Microsoft is similar to Novell’s, so Samsung’s failure would be wonderful news for GNU/Linux and a disaster to Microsoft’s plan against it. █
