Summary: As criticism of Novell's Mono keeps rising, Mono entanglements seemingly continue to spread further (even in a KDE distribution)

Harvard Business School has this new paper about "Mixed Source", which is Novell's strategy [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]^*.

A token of this strategy would have to be Mono, which Jeremy Allison's latest column has cast a shadow upon [1, 2]. The fallout continues:

It may be recalled that Allison quit Novell in disgust soon after the company signed a patent indemnification deal with Microsoft in November 2006.

[...]

"Miguel's employer, Novell, has a patent agreement with Microsoft that exempts Mono users from Microsoft patent aggression, so long as you get Mono from Novell. Miguel takes pains to point this out," Allison wrote.

As far as Mono goes, De Icaza has implemented parts of it which are not covered by the specifications submitted to the standards body ECMA by Microsoft; the parts submitted are said to be available on royalty-free terms and without fear of patent violations.

Novell carries on developing Banshee, which already makes use of non-ECMA parts of .NET and thus falls outside the awful MCP. Banshee is an example of Free software that only customers of Novell can use safely. And mind the cost associated with MonoTouch, for example. From the news:

Take, for instance, MonoTouch, Novell’s recently released tool for programming the iPhone with C# and .NET. It costs US$400 on top of the normal iPhone development requirements: the purchase of an iPhone and a Mac.

Who needs MonoTouch? MonoTouch is about making the iPhone and the Mac platforms for Microsoft development.

Meanwhile, Novell's de Icaza promotes MonoSpace, which we wrote about in [1, 2, 3]. Watch this part.

# And I will focus on the schmoozing.

Why does de Icaza use this term? "Schmoozing" is an arcane term that Microsoft uses (only internally) in reference to AstroTurfing and persuasion [1, 2]. It's exactly the type of thing Microsoft applied to de Icaza in order to "charm" him.

As one final note, as much as I am pleased with KDE 4.3 and as satisfied as I am with the beta of Kubuntu 9.10, earlier today in Message-ID <hbd5vg$1tf$1@news.albasani.net> (USENET) I read the following:

I just did a quick look in Synaptic, after a couple upgrades from Edubuntu.

Only thing using Mono is Evolution. Since it is not required, it can be uninstalled, along with the Mono libraries. Nothing else I see is using Mono, and all the rest is not installed by default.

Since Fedora already has a Winforms issue, I decided to investigate the above on my main machine. I was greeted with the following when preparing to install Evolution in KDE4.

Evolution is a groupware suite which integrates mail, calendar, address book, to-do list and memo tools. Additional features include integration with Exchange and Groupwise servers, newsgroup client, LDAP support, web calendars and synchronization with Palm devices. Evolution is a graphical application that is part of GNOME, and is distributed by Novell, Inc. See http://www.novell.com/products/evolution/ for more information. The following plugins belonging to the "base" set are included. ● calendar-file ● calendar-http ● calendar-weather ● itip-formatter ● plugin-manager ● python ● default-source ● addressbook-file ● startup-wizard ● mark-all-read ● groupwise-features ● groupwise-account-setup ● webdav-account-setup ● mail-account-disable ● publish-calendar ● caldav ● imap-features ● google-account-setup ● sa-junk-plugin ● bogo-junk-plugin ● exchange-operations ● mono

Mind that last package. Not only OpenSUSE has adopted or inherited such a dependency problem. ⬆ ____ ^* Novell views itself neither as an "open source" company nor a "Free (libre) software" company. In reality, Novell is predominantly proprietary.

"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