06.19.08

Why Is Mono in Fedora? Nobody Knows… It’s Possibly a Secret

Posted in Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Red Hat, SCO, Virtualisation at 5:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Searching for truth about Mono

We continue to explore the legal implications of building the GNU desktop using Mono. As readers may be aware, this Web site, among several others, has been a critic of Novell’s Mono for quite some time.

We are now aware, based on the assessment of the SFLC, that Novell’s Moonlight is a legal risk (or uncertainty at best). Fedora forbade it. The key worry though is that strategic direction gets changed to favour the Microsoft API in several places, which is akin to adopting or supporting Microsoft codecs. It gives a sworn enemy of libre software powers that can essentially eliminate the freedom of the desktop — for good.

It’s important to act upon this early, or else it might become irreversible, at least for important portions of the code pool.

The other day, Charles wrote a nice piece detailing the differences between Red Hat’s approach and Novell’s approach to handling of intellectual monopolies.

I have frequently expressed myself about the patent and business agreement between Novell and Microsoft.

[...]

Novell did precisely not sign a patent agreement with Microsoft debunking any claims or myths related to FOSS infringing Microsoft’s “intellectual property”. It implicitly did just the contrary: Microsoft and Novell were teaming up to “protect” Novell customers against patent claims made by…Microsoft.
The agreement was only covering Novell customers (not even OpenSuse users) and was at the same time contradicting the GPL (v2). Red Hat’s settlement does not seem to conflict with any version of the GPL as it places no burden or extra deeds on users and developers of GPLv3 software (More on that later).
There was no prior art, no litigation, and perhaps as important as the rest, the Novell-Microsoft agreement involved money. Lots of it . On the other hand, Red Hat received to my knowledge no payment for the settlement and as a future outcome, no strong incentive to do business with the plaintiffs and have its existing customers sign some dubious “software patent insurance”.

[...]

Contrary to what can be read here and there, the GPL v3 does not deny the existence of software patents. That would be stupid, as the GPL has been designed to live in a legal environment where such patent claims would be made against Free Software. What it does however is denying software patents the possibility to infringe on the users and developers’ freedom and ability to run, use, modify and redistribute software. If the software cannot be redistributed without some form of immunity in regard of software patents, then a poison pill option exists. Red Hat’s settlement does not apply here. What Red Hat did was “clean” patent busting: they demonstrated prior art first, and then essentially killed the patents by extending the immunity to those patents to anyone using the problematic software apps. That’s how historical it gets.

I am, just like many others, left not wholly satisfied by this. I am very happy of course, of the outcome of this lawsuit, but I know that the real issue at stake is software patents and that what will really put all these issues to rest, ultimately, shall be the end of software patents.

Charles speaks about a “poison pill”. The name of it may be Mono. Why is this questionable piece inside branches other than Novell’s (e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora)? Let’s explore how it slipped into Fedora.

I've fully reviewed the archive now, and this is pretty much all
the information I could find:

1. The decision to allow Mono to enter the tree seems to have been made
   arbitrarily by Red Hat, with no community consultation, and in spite
   of protests (including some by high profile Red Hat personnel -
   mostly expressed as a rejection of Mono before the announcement).

2. There has only ever been one public announcement on the subject, and
   that was made (with some dismay, it seems) by Tom Callaway:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2006-January/msg00588.html

3. There has only ever been one, extremely reserved, explanation given
   for this decision, in a blog post by Greg DeKoenigsberg:

   "Business considerations that prevented certain Mono components from
    being included in Fedora previously have now been resolved."

http://gregdek.livejournal.com/3597.html

   The specific nature of this resolution is not given.

4. There is precious little concrete information about precisely who
   made these arbitrary decisions that also affected the Fedora
   community distro, but as best as I can deduce, the key players seem
   to be Greg DeKoenigsberg (as above) and Christopher Blizzard,
   although it may be that these were simply the only people discussing
   it publicly:

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=188

5. The nearest thing to an actual justification for this acceptance of
   Mono, is that the OIN offers a kind of Mexican Stand-Off protection
   to those who implement it:

http://gregdek.livejournal.com/4008.html

My final conclusion is that Fedora includes encumbered, non-Free
software, that is covered by patents owned by Microsoft, and assured by
a patent covenant that is not worth the (metaphorical) paper it's
written on, since Moonlight, which is also covered by this same type of
covenant by the same company, has recently been exposed by Groklaw as
undistributable (I'm advised that PJ is currently investigating Mono as
well). The announcement and justification for this inclusion is
extremely sparse, and there has been almost no community consultation on
the subject, either before or after the fact.

This hopefully sums up Red Hat’s (or Fedora in practice) decision to adopt Mono. More people should be aware of this. It invalidates Jeff Waugh’s “if Red Hat does it, then it’s OK” claim. No clear reasons seem to be given. Mark Shuttleworth’s defense of it seems to be the argument that a separate and greater threat exists, but that’s like blowing your toe because your entire foot might be in danger.

A few quick points ought to be added:

Red Hat has been hiring top lawyers recently, not necessarily in preparation for anything, but Red Hat’s people have been negotiating in the back rooms with Microsoft for almost a year. Codecs, for instance, were negotiated, but Red Hat didn’t lose that fight. There were other such talks about intellectual monopolies that go approximately 2 years back.
Technical exclusion using Novell’s deal (e.g. hypervisors) is not sufficient for Microsoft to maintain dominance. It needs software patents and ‘licensing’ too (Mono, Moonlight, etc). If Microsoft’s profit decline at the end of this quarter (again), then it’s likely to just get even more vicious.
If the Debian Project was concerned enough about trademarks to create IceWeasel and Fedora is at least raising similar issues about the freedom values of Firefox (or deficiencies), how would they feel about Novell copyrights in Mono projects, let alone software patents?

It is our humble assessment that — in the long term at least — Novell and Microsoft will be the next SCO in the sense that they can use software patents rather than copyrights (a ‘stronger’ form of intellectual monopoly).

Novell claimed that it would not ever resort to this, but the company in its existing form crumbles while .NET developers are hired. Yesterday we saw the departure of a Novell vice president. An anonymous reader wrote to tell us: “Why is he leaving or was he asked to leave in light of the partner blunders of late who’s next watch and see if Ebzery gets the chop.”

Novell is a large company. There’s still a lot that we don’t know about its direction. █

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How Microsoft’s OSS Insiders Can Plant the Seeds of Intellectual Monopolies

Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Open XML, Patents, Windows at 4:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

‘Covert ops’ for software patents among so-called ‘dissidents’

One of the disappointing things about Microsoft’s rocky affairs in Europe is that software patents get pushed onto table using buzzwords like “reasonable” (as in RAND) and "interoperabile" [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11].

As we showed very recently, based on unpublished research and reports from FFII, Microsoft still wants GNU/Linux tax (even in Europe). On the face of it, the US Department on Justice does not stand in the way of this self-serving plot. From last night’s news:

Microsoft, DOJ issue status report on interoperability compliance

[...]

Also, 49 companies have licensed patents for the communications protocols since the final judgment, with 36 of the companies signing aboard for a royalty bearing license.

[...]

To date the interoperability labs, which are offered free to MCPP licensees at its Microsoft Engineering Center, Microsoft completed an interoperability lab with one licensee in March and another in May.

Interestingly enough, here comes a timely interview that grills Microsoft on the issues it stubbornly tries to escape.

There has been some concern that GPL implementations of material covered by Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise are prohibited. Microsoft could resolve this with a clear statement that GPL implementations are OK. Why hasn’t it?

[...]

Microsoft made it clear last year that it wanted to encumber the open source communities with patent royalties. Do you expect that Microsoft sponsored standards will tend to be covered by Microsoft patents? CNN’s senior editor said: “If the company gets its way, free software won’t be free anymore.” is this an accurate claim?

Microsoft does not deliver answers. It just flees the them and hopes for uncertainty to prevail on the face of it. Here is what OSNews had to say about it:

He also gives a painfully polished response to CNN’s senior editor’s claims that the company is trying to eliminate free software.Typical Microsoft PR response to tough questions, but interesting nonetheless….

It remains true that Microsoft cannot compete with zero-cost or low-cost competition that thrives in massive-scale collaboration. The monopoly relies a great deal on being able to extract money from this competitor, if not just exclude, punish, intimidate and ruin its name. This way, not only can it make money as a licensor, but it also make its competitor’s offerings more expensive. It’s a win-win and a double-win situation, but how can Microsoft ever persuade Free software developers to comply with draconian laws? Using ‘plantations’ perhaps, as it is a matter of perception.

“OpenLogic, for example, is a company that is run by a former Microsoft chap.”There is an informational and also a technical aspect at play. On the one hand, Microsoft can try to deliver and perpetuate the belief that software patents are already honoured by Free software developers (and that they loathe GPLv3); on the other hand — and at the same time in fact — Microsoft can ‘poison’ Free software with what’s considered more trivially provable as infringing (Hallo, ~~Moto~~ Mono).

Yesterday we shared some commentary, which was backed with news, in order to show that the threat comes from the inside. OpenLogic, for example, is a company that is run by a former Microsoft chap. It claims to have established somewhat of a ‘census’ that encompasses open source, but it’s far from it. It could be used as just a monitoring project — spyware that’s akin to Microsoft Windows which sends Redmond a list of all your installed applications every time Windows Update is invoked (automatically).

At the same time, as just spotted in another site (ComputerWorld UK), Glyn Moody draws his conclusions about GPLv3 based on ~~Microsoft~~ Black Duck (CEO Doug Levin no longer works at Microsoft). Remember ACT?

Microsoft influence is only to be expected where there are inter-personal relationship and past colleagues (de Icaza, for example, has friends at Microsoft). They’re everywhere. And Dana Blankenborn has just explained how they buy their way into the ‘community’.

Why is it that all these open source news sites, blog sites, and resource sites are still being sponsored by Microsoft?

From an ‘us’ (Free software) against ‘them’ (proprietary suppression) situation it becomes a ‘them’ versus ‘them’ situation. They try to dominate both sides and control the direction of both — whether deliberately or not.

One subject that was discussed in the IRC channel a short while ago are ways in which people like Walli (former Microsoft employee with software patent/s) can steer developers away from the GPLv3 by befriending them. He is not alone.

There is a lot of deception already going on. For example, Microsoft is misusing the word “open” (claiming to be a fan of it). Yesterday we wrote about the "only 4" remark, which you can find out some more about if you are curious. It’s about OOXML.

The headline in this story tells the reader that Microsoft describes itself as “open and collaborative” despite the fact that it resorted to corruption, vicious attacks against ODF and those who defended ODF and even technical sabotage. Is that “open and collaborative”? No, it’s just useless marketing pitch. It’s a lie. █

“The Norwegian [OOXML] affair was a scandal and we are still pursuing it. We haven’t given up hope of changing the vote back to No, and we hope people who experienced similar travesties in other countries will do the same.”

–Steve Pepper