02.07.10
The Microsoft Apologists and Boosters Really, Really Like Novell!
Summary: A complete list of news articles about Moonlight 3.0 preview shows that its biggest fans are Microsoft fans
WE ARE never surprised to rediscover that those who defend a multiple offender and law-breaking beast are also promoting Microsoft Trojans like Mono and Moonlight. They offer wooden horses as gifts.
Today we look at Moonlight 3.0 preview. We have taken stock of anyone who covered it, based on Google News. All that we found was coverage from Microsoft booster Gavin Clarke, his colleague Mary Jo Foley (“Look! I’m writing about Linux too… [but only when it's good for Microsoft]“), and longtime Microsoft booster Marius Oiaga. They are continuing a trend we that noted and highlighted many times before, namely that Moonlight is being promoted heavily by fans and defenders of Microsoft’s illegal monopoly. Joining those 3 we have part-time Microsoft booster Darryl Taft. The only exception we could find came from The Inquirer, but that writer too had come from IDG, which has a financial relationship with Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and covered this Moonlight 3.0 preview as well. It’s hardly even news, which is why GNU/Linux sites hardly mentioned it at all.
We are quite concerned about Ubuntu's attitude towards Mono. Yesterday we learned about a fascinating rumour that Mark Shuttleworth resigned from Canonical’s top spot so that Google can take over Canonical. The rumour comes from Africa.
“Yesterday we learned about a fascinating rumour that Mark Shuttleworth resigned from Canonical’s top spot so that Google can take over Canonical.”One reader urged us to comment about Canonical’s addition of an Apple enthusiast to its staff (he is also a former Novell employee). We wrote about it yesterday while still trying to figure out whether it’s an identity crisis for Canonical. There is a lot of discussion about this in our IRC channel.
Pamela Jones from Groklaw wrote: “On a personal note, while I like Matt personally, he wrote to me not long ago that he couldn’t see why people were so negative about Microsoft, so this is the end for Ubuntu being truly FOSS, as far as I’m concerned, and the beginning of it becoming fused mystery meat, if I may put it that way. They can be whatever they want, of course, but I think it would be foolish to expect anything now but a loss of the F in FOSS at Canonical now.”
Canonical has already hired a man from Microsoft to lead its desktop efforts and a couple of weeks ago he announced Canonical’s decision [1, 2] to send search requests to Microsoft’s Bong [sic] (Canonical left users out of this decision). Then there’s the issue of Mono, which is interesting because the same guy from Microsoft suggested removing the GIMP (a decision that most users oppose, based on a poll, so the will of the majority was eventually ignored).
GNOME Journal is promoting a Novell-sponsored and Novell-run project that uses Mono and only Novell customers can use. GNOME has a conflict of interests because it is headed by a Novell employee.
Novell is still busy selling “protection coupons” against Microsoft’s software patents, but Novell is not doing as well as it claims.
The SD Times reports that Microsoft has sold nearly all of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) support coupons. Microsoft purchased the $240 million worth of coupons from Novell as part of patent indemnification deal. According to Microsoft, a total of 475 customers have used an undisclosed number of the coupons. Based on those figures, each of these customers has bought, on average, just over half a million dollars worth of coupons.
“I’ve heard from Novell sales representatives that Microsoft sales executives have started calling the Suse Linux Enterprise Server coupons “royalty payments”…”
–Matt Asay, April 21st, 2008
