10.02.10
The Redmond-Associated Press is Promoting Mono
Eat not from the fruit of Microsoft patenting
Summary: Owner of several Microsoft-oriented ‘news’ sites (1105 Media) was promoting forbidden fruit like Mono quite a lot in recent days
1105 Media, which produces some pro-Microsoft Web sites, is doing it again. For quite a few years it has been promoting projects like Mono and Moonlight, which are beneficial to Microsoft. This silly promotion leads to other promotion by GNU/Linux sites of programs like Banshee, which is a Novell-developed patent trap (using parts of Mono that the MCP explicitly excludes), not to mention other programs and games that covertly bring Mono with them. In recent days we’ve been seeing a lot of promotion for OpenRA (here is the latest example). To quote the official Web site, OpenRA “Requires Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5 SP1 or later; or an up-to-date version of Mono…”
For those who really want to see the Mono promotion (and Microsoft virtualisation promotion) from 1105 Media, here is the part where it promotes MonoTouch. This ‘Microsoft press’ also keeps grooming Mono celebrity Miguel de Icaza, who is a Microsoft MVP. Michael Desmond interviews him and touches subjects like Vista Phone 7 [sic]. To quote Miguel de Icaza:
When we started Mono with Mono for Linux, we had absolutely no relationship with Microsoft. And I think that some people at Microsoft liked it, from the early days, but that some people didn’t like it from the early days.
Microsoft didn’t have an official position about it back in 2000 or 20001. But today we have a fairly good relationship with them and we collaborate with them on Moonlight, which is our Silverlight implementation for Linux today. We’re hoping to put it into other systems and devices in the future.
What devices? They try to put Mono inside Android [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15], which is already being sued by Microsoft for API-type patents (like Mono), multiple times even!
Microsoft’s flippant CEO claims that “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” However, sometimes it seems like FAT and Mono are a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. Now, if only the ‘Microsoft press’ stopped promoting Mono so much… █
“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
