A common objection to Mono is its fuzzy legal position. Although parts of .NET are ECMA standards open for anyone to implement, other parts (including ASP.NET) are not. Mono implements ASP.NET as well as other non-ECMA class libraries. The worry has been: if Mono gets successful enough to threaten Microsoft, will there be legal problems?
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See the comments below for more. It seems this falls short of a promise not to sue over patent breaches in Mono, if they exist, except in certain defined circumstances (Novell customers or non-commercial). I guess that is not surprising.
Trying to change the direction of inevitable things
BY LOOKING at the Halloween Documents, which are rather old by now, one can see that Microsoft realised it would not manage to compete against Free software. Not unless it turned to criminalbehaviour, which it has. It’s doing it all the time (c.f. OOXML), but some people hide under a rock and prefer not to see it. Instead, they discredit those who do, typically suing derogatory labels [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
ZDNet has a new article which is a complaint about this hijack of “open source” — whatever that actually means nowadays — by vendors.
Like me, you’ve probably read articles on how free software, or open source, is going to thrive in 2009, and how businesses everywhere are going to survive the recession by migrating to it.
Perhaps you agree with those views; perhaps you don’t. However, what I find most interesting is what people mean by the words ‘open source’ and, to be even more specific, what business model they have in mind.
We often assume others mean the same thing as we do in the words they use, but the truth is more nuanced than that. The real meaning behind the words is worth examining, especially when someone is trying to sell you something.
Dana Blankenhorn, a Windows user who runs ZDNet’s ‘Linux’ blog, points out that the ZDNet article (the one that’s referred to above) directs its complaint almost squarely at Microsoft.
Today, for instance, our sister publication in the UK has a piece by Mark Taylor of SiriusIT, calling Microsoft’s very definition of open source a straw man.
Microsoft representatives generally try to establish a world view sympathetic to their own by talking as if the accepted distinction in the open-source arena is between commercial and non-commercial. That definition is inaccurate and its intent is to damage.
The true distinction is between proprietary and non-proprietary. The false distinction between commercial and non-commercial is designed to imply that only proprietary software is acceptable commercially — that is, companies should keep buying the proprietary stuff and leave the non-proprietary to hobbyists.
This observation about Microsoft is correct [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and it is very harmful indeed. Microsoft is also trying to change back the definition of "open standards" so as to exclude source code as a requirement and include software patents instead, even in Europe where these are not legal.
Pundits in the ICT industry will remember that as country manager for Novell, Masie was involved in the Microsoft/Novell deal of 2006 which was met with widespread controversy and efforts to boycott Novell.
The world is no black and white. But when a company commits crimes time after time, then it can’t whine about being labeled black. It’s time for Novell to wake up and realise that its proximity to Microsoft has it tuning grey and its passing its own dark shades to other GNU/Linux vendors, with whom code is shared. █
SOME months ago, at the very peak of the OOXML corruptions, we missed quite an important post that not only reveals more about the relationship between Microsoft and Jan van den Beld [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] but also shows Microsoft’s Jason Matusow accusing Groklaw of being an IBM front. This would not be the first time that Jason Matusow lies and insults people's intelligence. Maybe it’s some sort of an internal ‘joke’ at Microsoft that Groklaw is affiliated with IBM and maybe they actually try to believe it when they tell people not to read Groklaw and that Groklaw is not reliable. SCO et al used the same tactics and even trolled the Web site in attempt to ruin its reputation or message (before a comments moderation policy was adopted). Watch the comments on this Matusow post:
The complaints keep rolling in on Groklaw about the outcome from Open XML. ***UPDATE #2: I went out to dinner and have been thinking a great deal about this. I do hold an opinion on this, but I think it is reasonable that people who read my blog expect me to be careful with my assertions. For that reason, I retract this statement.***Strange that a website setup by IBM to fight a proxy war during the SCO case would be so focused on the Open XML discussion today. But that is for another day. ***UPDATE: Concern has been raised in the comments of this blog about my assertion of Groklaw and its contents. My assertion in the preeceeding paragraph is my opinion – take it or leave it a face value please.***
This strikeout (omission) only came after people like Andy Updegrove had complained. According to Microsoft’s attitude, all opinions and assessments must be paid for. Well, that’s the Microsoft Mentality™ because those who support Microsoft typically do it for money [1, 2, 3] and they totally lack a sense of ethics. Who would voluntarily support an abusive monopoly?
“…Microsoft wished to promote SCO and its pending lawsuit against IBM and the Linux operating system. But Microsoft did not want to be seen as attacking IBM or Linux.”
We’ve shared information [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15] and a video about this before. It’s not so easy to find ithis because it’s kept fairly secret until shortly after it’s ready for signing and too late for people to learn about and protest against.
To maximise awareness and encourage action against these intellectual monopolies, here are the rest of the videos we could find, starting with those that are more decent (some are less accurate). █
THE notorious Partner Group had Novell mentioned in another one of its ‘precious’ reports.
In its 2008 Web Access Management Magic Quadrant report, Gartner has placed Oracle, IBM, CA, Sun Microsystems and Novell in the leaders’ quadrant. Gartner positions vendors in the leaders’ quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute.
Finance
Previously, we covered Novell’s results right here, but there is still same late coverage.
* Teradata 550 SMP (symmetric multiprocessing)- a departmental data warehouse, designed to meet customers’ need for a smaller, less expensive system. It was developed to run a single application or support test and development workloads and can be installed within hours of delivery. It is simple to set up and can use the Novell SUSE Linux 64-bit OS or Windows.
OpenSUSE 11.1 packaging photos appeared in the official OpenSUSE Web site and those who were impatient got the distribution a little bit early (thus not the final version), then posted this video, among others.
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