Summary: Microsoft projects are still upselling a distribution from which Microsoft extracts money for imaginary software patents

THE LATEST bit of news about Moonlight was expected to have untold information which is crucial. This very self-explanatory picture reminds us that Moonlight is essentially a Microsoft project and Microsoft is not allowed to help its #1 competitor, by definition (unless it somehow helps Microsoft in another way).

After a little bit of research it turned out that Novell customers are still in a privileged position when it comes to Moonlight. Sam Varghese writes:

There is one simple reason - the version of Moonlight that other distributions can offer will be able to play only media which are in free or open source formats.

To play any other format means one has to buy licences for proprietary media codecs from the owners.

Users who obtain Moonlight from Novell will have access to these codecs.

But you wouldn't know about this if you read the Novell press release. (Microsoft hasn't deemed this announcement, which apparently is another earth-shaking one for the Moonlight project head, Miguel de Icaza, important enough to issue a media release).

Here's how Novell puts it: "The covenant is no longer limited to users that obtain Moonlight from Novell or its channel, but now covers users who obtain Moonlight from any third party, including other Linux distributors. Media Codecs for MP3 and VC1, and in the future H.264 and AAC, are supported through the Microsoft Media Pack, a Microsoft-delivered set of media codes that offer optimized and licensed decodecs to every Linux user who obtains Moonlight from Novell."

For completeness, here is Novell's announcement and a variety of articles about it:

• Novell finalizes Moonlight 2; offers broader distribution terms



• Moonlight, Microsoft Patent Covenant Updates



• Moonlight 2 hot on the heels of Silverlight



• Silverlight for Linux Evolves, Moonlight 2 Available for Download



• Open source Silverlight clone rev'd

Varghese has also attempted to find out what led to hostility towards GNU recently, after complaints about posts in Planet GNOME [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. He writes:

A member of the GNOME Foundation board has denied that a post by GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza led to a discussion on the Foundation mailing list which resulted in a call for the project to cut its ties with the GNU Project.

Behdad Esfahbod made reference to a story in these columns, wherein it was claimed that a Planet GNOME post by De Icaza, about Microsoft's Silverlight technology, served as the catalyst for another Foundation member, Lucas Rocha, to start a discussion on members' complaints about the type of content appearing on the Planet.

It is commonly argued that posts endorsing VMware were the cause for this whole incident. VMware is not much of a friend and we wrote about it in:

• No Point to Microsoft's New Datacentres, Microsoft-dominated VMware Comes to Redmond's Back Garden
• VMware Turns Sour After Microsoft Intervention
• What is Going on at VMware?

Speaking of which, watch how Microsoft still discriminates against GNU/Linux distributions that don't pay Microsoft.

9 Reasons Enterprises Shouldn’t Switch To Hyper-V

[...]

1. Breadth of OS support Before we get into the nitty gritty, let’s start with the most basic of features and simplest of tasks. Say you are an IT shop that supports more than just Windows servers; you have a mixed environment with different flavors of Linux and Unix. Hyper-V, however, supports only Windows and SuSE Linux. That’s it. If I am to recommend an enterprise virtualization infrastructure, it would need to support a bit more than one flavor of Linux.

After Xen was brought closer to Microsoft, its partner of the year Citrix is helping Hyper-V using Xen, as expected. From The Register:

You heard that right. Citrix is getting its virtual machine failover technology to Microsoft's Hyper-V and integrating it with Systems Center management tools ahead of its own XenServer/Essentials combo.

Microsoft is just trying to distort this entire market. Almost all the large virtualisation companies (except Qumranet/KVM, which Red Hat bought, as well as Virtual Iron, which oracle bought to bury) are there to serve Microsoft/Windows in some way. Novell is the same and it is going downhill. Tom Harvey has just written about the two executives who flee Novell and he adds this factoid:

Williams is trimming his estimates of Novell revenues for the first quarter of the new fiscal year by 3 percent and for next year by 1 percent compared to this year, with earnings per share for the year at 31 cents, down 9.6 percent over the current year.

"The biggest risk that we see for Novell in the year ahead is that management will lose credibility with the Street and the stock will be dead money until proof of concept becomes visible to investors," the report said.

As we wrote earlier in the week, the ridiculously high bonuses that Ron Hovsepian receives may indicate that he would otherwise leave the company, leading to a huge loss of credibility. ⬆