11.29.10
Novell’s Last Week – Part II: Mono Boosters Ride AttachMSFT News and “It Will be Interesting to see if Mr Icaza Joins Microsoft!”
Photo via Wikipedia (image modified)
Summary: With the core of the Mono team shifting to Seattle (Washington) management there is concern that this Microsoft threat will increase activity rather than be decommissioned
THOSE WHO say that AttachMSFT will axe Mono were mentioned here last week. We no longer cover silly posts that help adoption of Mono (and sometimes Moonlight) because the project seems to have hit a wall. The Mono boosters saw the AttachMSFT announcement last Monday and kept pretending nothing had happened. Their Microsoft-groomed leaders are still defending Microsoft and promoting a surrogate of Visual Studio, NoDevelop [sic].
Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza gets flak for his attitude and some pro-GNU/Linux sites are thinking he might join Microsoft (he already did in a way). To quote Muktware for example:
As feared, Microsoft is acquiring technology assets developed by Novell, the leading Open Source vendor. Novell will sell its ‘so-called’ Intellectual Properties to Microsoft-owned CPTN Holdings LLC for mere $450 million in cash.
The foundation of Novell’s acquisition (or its technology assets) by Microsoft was laid when the two companies signed a highly controversial patent-agreement to cover their products on November 2, 2006. Under the five year agreement, the companies also agreed to work closely in the name of ‘inter-operability’.
We did not see any Microsoft products being made available on Linux platform at the consumer front. However, we did see Novell’s attempts to create products which lock Linux user/develops into the Microsoft technologies — Mono and Silverlight being two examples which were developed under the leadership of Miguel de Icaza. It will be interesting to see if Mr Icaza joins Microsoft!
Yes, the author did write: “It will be interesting to see if Mr Icaza joins Microsoft!” He is already trying to float a copy of a dead project (Silver Lie [sic]), which is better off abandoned, not developed any further. It ought to be emphasised that Mono is where Novell and Microsoft intersect a great deal. Watch Microsoft boosters (former Microsoft employees who promote Mono) mentioning this acquisition’s announcement and trying to ride it with a press release and shallow coverage following it [1, 2, 3] (some are just almost identical copies of the press release).
One fellow Mono booster, who is rude towards Mono sceptics, is joining Collabora which was employing Philip Van Hoof when he lobbied to push GNU out of GNOME [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
I am very, VERY proud to say that from the start of January, I’ll be joining Collabora Ltd as their new Systems Manager.
It’s sad to see Collabora too getting filled with Mono boosters. █
twitter said,
November 29, 2010 at 9:34 am
Again, I’m saddened to see Gnome people continue to wastes time on Silverlight and Mono when there’s important work like ODF compatibility to be done. Google searching for “odf gnome” returns nasty FUD like this or this early thing from a “spreadsheet proctologist” . These people boost Microsoft, praise ooxml and slam odf as technically inadequate when it comes to spreasheets. That might have been true in 2006, but it’s not anymore and Rob Weir put the FUD to rest in early 2009. While ODS interoperability could be better, the only real problems are Microsoft and Gnome. there seems to be hope for Gnome and the high search ranking of Gnome nay-sayers and Microsoft mouthpieces might be more astroturf and google bombing than Gnome opinion. Gnumeric is still my favorite spreadsheet, so I wish that developers had spent more time on it than they did on failed Microsoft projects.
OOXML and Silverlight are shining examples of why free software coders should avoid Microsoft tech. Years ago, I asked Gnome people why they would waste time on OOXML and other Microsoft tech. Their answer was that these formats would soon become dominant and that I’d thank them later. I thought then that chasing Microsoft tail lights was futile because Microsoft would always move the goal posts. Now I have a new point. Microsoft is a dying company that no longer sets standards of any kind, not even poor ones that constantly shift. Ironically, Microsoft’s OOXML focus has made previous binary efforts look more successful than they really are. I’m glad people solved that problem and especially glad that Open Office can deal with most of it, but I know it is incomplete and would be broken if Microsoft had the manpower to work on it. I’ll also be happy if any progress can be made on OOXML, but ODF is a more widely used and technically superior standard. We would all be better off with ODF as a universal document format and that can easily happen with a little help from friends.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
November 29th, 2010 at 10:39 am
Some members of GNOME underestimate the threat posed by Microsoft.