05.05.10

Microsoft/Novell Faking “Open Source” and Pushing .NET Into Web Browsers

Posted in ECMA, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, OpenOffice at 2:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Mono is greed

Summary: Microsoft does not keep its promises regarding “Open Source” in .NET and its MVP Miguel de Icaza is trying to ram .NET into Web browsers

“Running Mono directly into the browser” is what our reader called this disturbing idea from Microsoft MVP de Icaza. Another reader explained that “Miguel de icaza wants .NET CLI to be embedded in browsers *Not really going through w3c*“

Is anyone surprised?

This is the type of thing that makes de Icaza a Microsoft MVP. It’s only becoming clearer over time who he’s really serving, no matter his denials regarding the question.

Which browser will be the first victim? Firefox or Chrome? Moonlight is already messing up with Firefox. Microsoft also shoved .NET into Firefox (for Windows) without permission, only to cause great distress and trouble.

Elsewhere in the news (notably Slashdot [1, 2]) we find that Microsoft is faking “Open Source” when it comes to .NET (who didn’t see that coming?).

figleaf writes “Three years ago, with much fanfare Microsoft announced it will make some the .Net libraries open source using their Microsoft Reference License. Since then Microsoft has reneged on its promise. The reference code site is dead, the blog is no longer updated and no one from Microsoft responds to any questions on the forum.”

To Microsoft, this whole “Open Source” idea seems nonsensical or “cancer” and “communism”; it’s just for marketing purposes and this is not the first time Microsoft is caught lying about parts of its code being “Open Source” (Sandcastle comes to mind [1, 2, 3, 4]).

The news above only comes to show Novell’s participation in Microsoft’s agenda, which is harmful to the Web as a whole.

Watch what Novell keeps doing to OpenOffice.org using its fork [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Novell advertises its OpenOffice.org fork as just a Windows office suite with OOXML and Visual Basic. Here is what Novell’s PR team wrote some days ago:

The answer is OpenOffice.org Novell Edition for Windows. We’ve recently released the 3.2 version, which contains bug fixes as well as many improvements over both the previous and community versions.

If you aren’t already familiar with this offering, OpenOffice.org Novell Edition for Windows is an open source office suite that is the best choice for interoperability with Microsoft Office. In addition to excellent performance and integrated extensions, the newest version allows users to access and edit Google Docs documents. It also includes enhanced spreadsheet capabilities such as more rows, better VBA macros and improved support for OpenXML files, the default format in the recent Microsoft Office versions.

Meanwhile, promoters of .NET/Mono (de Icaza included) carry on advertising for a Novell colleague who wants an image editor for GNU/Linux to be .NET-based [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] and thus promote Pinta , despite the known problems.

Novell is also trying to put MonoTouch in Android [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], regardless of or because of Apple’s actions [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. This is problematic since Microsoft already uses patent threats against Android and this extortion sometimes works.

There’s a disturbance in the gadget force everyone. You probably aren’t aware of it because most you are Mac or Windows users, but those who’ve been using Linux on the desktop or on servers have known for some time that Microsoft has been bullying Linux software vendors with threats of lawsuits for infringing on their intellectual property (IP). Remedy: sign our “patent agreement” and share your technology in exchange for immunity.

Microsoft claims that most parts of what makes up the GNU/Linux OS infringes on Microsoft’s closed-source patent war-chest. To put it in simple terms, they claim that they came up with X process or X functionality first and they have a patent on that feature. I’m not a IP or patent lawyer, so I can’t get into specifics, but I can tell you that the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) movement prides itself on being open and sharing code with others to be used how one sees fit. And, if you make an improvement, to share that improvement back with the community. FOSS developers like to look at a proprietary app and say, we can make that… and not only can we make it, we’ll make it better through the inspection of thousands of users who will voluntarily test the code, kill bugs, improve upon the feature-set, and so on and so on.

This whole mess started with Novell, which is currently injecting actual patent traps into everything that uses Linux. █

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