OUR longtime participant MinceR has decided to call Microsoft MVPs "Most Valuable Propagandists" and Omar calls them Microsoft Most Valuable Hypocrites after being called names by Miguel de Icaza (insults like "you are talking out of your ass"). How typical [1, 2, 3]. It came up when this Microsoft MVP, de Icaza, wrote: "It is all fun and games, until IBM sues your open source project for patent infringement". IBM behaves badly, but what if it bought Novell? Would de Icaza flee to Microsoft? Some pundits opine that IBM is in a position to buy Novell, whereas others believe that HP is the more likely candidate.
Last week Christopher Dawson posted a list of reasons why IBM should buy Novell, but with this announcement by Microsoft and Red Hat it would seem that HP buying Novell (or perhaps HP partnering with Intel to make a joint purchase) would make far more sense right now. Everything that Chris said about IBM buying Novell remains true with HP doing the buying, with the added bonus of guaranteeing that there would be continued development of Linux for HP’s flagship processor. HP has made a significant investment in the Itanium-based Integrity servers and the limiting of future options for the processor isn’t a recipe for long-term success.
We just released our updated version of MonoTools for Visual Studio
--Robert Scoble, former Microsoft evangelist