03.07.10
Gemini version available ♊︎Despite (or Because of) Microsoft’s Patent Extortion, Novell Continues to Focus on Mono
Summary: More Mono news and changes in Novell’s staff
Several days ago we wrote about I-O Data joining Microsoft's Linux racket. There is a discussion about it in Slashdot and in relation to another issue, says this one person: “Microsoft has been using those patents to get the scared to ink patent deals. Nothing from a court to make a single patent claim from Microsoft valid, while somehow we are to believe that Microsoft is about playing nice with opensource ?; that it uses it patents against ?.”
“Novell had whitepapers bumped up a couple of days ago (reappearing in the news) in order to demote Red Hat, not Microsoft.”How can Novell and its sympathisers still pretend that Microsoft is safe to work with? Novell had whitepapers bumped up a couple of days ago (reappearing in the news) in order to demote Red Hat, not Microsoft [1, 2]. This has gone on for several weeks now.
Novell has also laid off many employees and often replaced them with people who are more familiar with Microsoft software (products like .NET). The following post is based on an article that we’ve mentioned here several times in recent weeks. Novell’s CEO admitted radically changing his workforce.
A quarter of Novell’s work force translates into a pretty large number of people scrambling to find work. (Even though there might not have been a net job loss, since Novel hired replacements.)
Those replacements are not always GNU/Linux oriented. Some are serving Microsoft with Mono and Moonlight in in Planet SUSE we just find updates about Moonlight accessibility (and accessibility for Mono too). Due to patent-related statements from Microsoft, it is safe to say that key Novell projects like Banshee (still in the news this week) are Novell-only software and OpenSUSE is viewed by some as a place for Mono. Here is an example from several days ago:
I am a C# programmer at work so I looked to see who was managing the Mono project, turns out Novell/OpenSuse are lying in bed with the Mono project. SO fast forward to today. Installed OpenSuse 11.2 on a server at work. This server is going to house Solr (running on Jetty) which will be used for product searches.
Is it Novell’s plan to capture and to spread C#? Is that its added value? "Peace of mind"? Microsoft is already playing hardball with software patents, so what is Novell thinking? It also helps Microsoft get its way with programmers (“API wars”). █
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