Bonum Certa Men Certa

Novell Helps Microsoft's Fight Against Ajax, Web Standards, SVG

THIS SHORT post touches on a subject that was covered here before. Novell is helping [1, 2] Microsoft's plot to turn the Web into the 'Microsoft Web' and as we pointed out 2 months ago, possible victims include SVG and JavaScript. Penguin Pete has just unleashed a post that complements past explanations of this problem, which jeopardises the Web and (free-of-charge) GNU/Linux at the same time. The most relevant part states:

Point three: Silverlight, as noted in its Wikipedia page, is also intended as an SVG-killer. This isn't just bad news; it's a tragedy. All modern web browsers except Microsoft Internet Explorer support and render SVG markup directly. If SVG was supported cross-platform, you'd see a new, beautiful web begin to form, where AJAX combines with SVG to create a Flash replacement. You'd see as much of a leap in web design with SVG as we saw with AJAX. Score: 2 bad, 1 good.

Point four: As the Adobe dictatorship benevolently tolerates FOSS development tools like SWFTools, Microsoft is temporarily tolerating the development of Moonlight, the FOSS equivalent of Silverlight. Tied score.

Point five: Of course, they're doing this because they possessed the soul of SUSE Linux, so they're still reselling Novell SUSE Linux licenses and whaddaya know, Novell sponsors Mono from which Moonlight is derived. This shows a huge breech of the Open Source fortress by Microsoft. One more step upstream, and they'll hop from SUSE to my own Slackware and I'll have the Microsoft Sound playing when my Slackware starts up and every man page will point me to a weblink to a useless MSN.net documentation page that's been moved five times since the distribution released. Then they'll just sneak into my house at night and graffiti a Windows logo on my wall or something. I dunno. Point 3-2 evil/good.


The best thing to do is to avoid Moonlight (Fedora already does) and protest against Silverlight. Moonlight is not just an enemy to Free software ('free' but Microsoft-patents-encumbered); it's also threatening the Internet and it's assisted by Novell, whose Web site comprises mostly binaries. Novell doesn't care about freedom and it probably never will.

Silverlight puke, barf

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