Bonum Certa Men Certa

Here Come the Anti-GNU/Linux (Yet 'Open') Software Licences from Microsoft

"Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer [...] I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. I'm an American; I believe in the American way, I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policymakers to understand the threat."

--Jim Allchin, Microsoft executive



LIKE SO MANY others, we were beyond "skeptical" when Microsoft tried to join OSI and hop on the "open source" bandwagon. Some external articles of interest include:



According to The Register, CodePlex' morph into GNU/Linux-hostile territories is just routine. It comes 'from above' -- from Microsoft's own licences.

Microsoft is posting code to its much-trumpeted CodePlex open-source projects site using licenses and conditions that go against the principles of open source.

The company has been posting projects under Microsoft licenses that stop you from running CodePlex projects on non-Windows platforms or restrict access to code.


And this is the host SourceForge plays ball with?

Miguel de Icaza has complained about such things, but yesterday he ran back to Microsoft, giving them credit and thanking them. And in other related news, it turns out that even self-appointed experts fail to understand Moonlight. Here is a portion from a new article:

Microsoft announced Silverlight in May of 2007 at their MIX conference held in Las Vegas. The first Community Technology Preview (CTP) was released a few months after that. The design goal behind Silverlight was to make it possible to build applications for the Web that used essentially the same code as you would use for a desktop application. From an implementation perspective that translates to a version of Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR) running inside the browser.

Linux is obviously missing in the list of supported platforms--at least it was in the beginning. That's where Moonlight comes in.


When asked why Siiverlight itself was not ported to GNU/Linux, Microsoft's response was that Novell's second-rare copycat [1, 2, 3] should do (or something along those lines). Since regulators would drag Microsoft's feet until it supports GNU/Linux, Novell did a double favour here to Microsoft:

  1. It made it seem like Microsoft collaborates with GNU/Linux
  2. It ensured that all GNU/Linux ever gets is an inferior and incompatible thing called Moonlight, which is not SIlverlight


Worth adding are the legal barriers associated with Moonlight. It serves Novell, which spreads Mono like it's mononucleosis. Novell has its reasons.

Bad Silverlight

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