Summary: Microsoft and Novell still market SUSE using patents; Mono revisited

FOR a couple of weeks now, The Register has been advertising a Webcast about Microsoft and Novell [1, 2]. Jason from The Source watched it and wrote about the shameless (and at times inaccurate) deliverables. Among them.

Here’s a slide where the gentleman from Novell talked up the 3 pillars of value that the Novell-Microsoft collaboration delivers:

"Intellectual Property"

There’s that good old “peace of mind” codeword that Microsoft and Novell love so much to throw around. How does one reconcile Novell’s statement that the ”agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property” with the constant marketing that only Novell can offer “IP peace of mind” and the bullet point that “Microsoft and Novell” provide “patent coverage”?

A little fancy dancing, perhaps?

Based on the news from Salt Lake City, Novell is still applying for and receiving software patents. Here is the latest:

Methods, data stores, data structures and systems for electronic identity aggregation , patent No. 7,571,172, invented by Scott Alan Isaacson of Woodland Hills, Stephen R Carter of Spanish Fork and Frank Allan Nutt of Austin, Texas, assigned to Novell Inc. of Provo.

Despite warnings from the Free Software Foundation, Novell carries on spreading .NET in the form of Mono. What's more problematic is that most GNOME-based distributions now include a tinge of Mono by default.

In order to claim that Mono is not imposed upon users, a prominent proponent of Mono has created the opposite of Bloatnux. This received some blog coverage and now this article, but it only came after Mono proponents had been begging for coverage and even repeatedly insulting those who don't give coverage (or don't give "sufficient" coverage) to some software whose name is an insult to its user.

Debian and Ubuntu Mono packager Jo Shields has come up with a Mono-free remix of the last released version of Ubuntu, version 9.04, which he has chosen to call Chicken Little Remix.

[...]

It is not certain that future Ubuntu versions will be dissected in this manner, though; in response to a query which followed his post, he said that it all depended on whether a community built up around it as he did not have the time to keep creating the CLR for every new Ubuntu version.

Chicken Little is intended as a slur, but coming from a rude person, that's not a surprise. As one of the commenters on the article at the top put it, "Let's see, this is the same Jo shields who has been dishing out insults, evasions, and misinformation, calls this remix Chicken Little, giving advice on good manners? Considering he was one of the leaders in filling forums with "Immovable, entrenched, irreconcilable viewpoints" and "A degree of outright lunacy", not to mention telling everyone who wasn't some kind of approved elite developer to STFU, I can't imagine why he thinks anyone should take him seriously." ⬆