Summary: More evidence arrives showing that Novell is simply advancing Microsoft at the expense of GNU/Linux

AS the previous post put it, Microsoft and Apple want developers to make their products more attractive and the Mono project has been helpful to both. Mono helps .NET, Visual Studio, and in turn Windows also [1, 2, 3, 4]. Mono also helps the iPhone by driving developers towards it. In general, Mono is channeling valuable resources in the direction of proprietary platforms.

“Novell and Microsoft have some big Silverlight news in store and Novell's vice president is obviously excited about it.”Our reader Oiaohm has just reminded us of Mono's role in displacing the GIMP [1, 2, 3] "If they were dropping it for [the] likes of digiKam," argues Oiaohm, that it would be okay, "but [not] something .NET." Oiaohm links to this article from a longtime proponent of Mono.

Novell and Microsoft have some big Silverlight news in store and Novell's vice president is obviously excited about it [1, 2]. Over at The Source, Jason writes a sequel about "The Future of Moonlight". From the his brand new essay:

It seems like just yesterday that Miguel de Icaza took such umbrage at being called a Microsoft apologist. Strange then, that he has now taken up the robes of a Microsoft evangelist, suggesting that it is at-long-last finally time to “start a movement to create a suite of Silverlight-based desktop applications”

As I pointed out earlier, Mr. de Icaza has abandonded even the pretense of promoting an Open Source development platform and seems perfectly content to promote Microsoft Silverlight as the new desktop “revolution”.

[...]

Let’s not dwell on the foolish and transparent attempt to deflect valid criticism as hate, but instead let’s look closer at his specific defense. Mr. de Icaza says he brought up about MonoTorrent, a GTK#-based application, but he also says he wants Silverlight to replace GTK#, and that he simply wants to re-implement MonoTorrent in Silverlight.

That’s a major problem with Mr. de Icaza. He doesn’t just want to build on top of what exists, he wants to replace what exists; replace with closed-source, proprietary, non-standard technology!

Later came this post from Jason, titled "de Icaza drools."

So there you have it, folks. Mr. de Icaza speaks for Team Mono in direct support of the Microsoft Silverlight “Revolution” – encouraging development with Closed Source, Proprietary Software. People have been constantly raising flags that Novell / Mr. de Icaza / Team Mono have lost sight of Free Software as they grow ever closer to Microsoft, and this is a startlingly black mark proving warnings come true.

In sharing these two bits of news about Silverlight not being cross-platform (we warned about this almost 2 years ago), one of our readers said that it "could be interesting."

It is indeed. It is interesting that a Novell vice president promotes Windows lock-in at the expense of Free software, but then again this vice president has a conflict of interests because he also works for Microsoft. Some of Novell's top management (including members of the board whom we wrote about before) are connected to Microsoft, so for those who have not gotten the message yet, parts of Novell are in essence an extension of Microsoft. The guys in Nuremberg help hide this because they actually do great work (on GNU/Linux). ⬆

"Now [Novell is] little better than a branch of Microsoft"

--LinuxToday Managing Editor