09.05.11

Cablegate: After Visit to Bill Gates, Chinese Government Signs Microsoft Cooperation Deal

Posted in Asia, Bill Gates, Cablegate, Microsoft at 8:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: How Microsoft is “enabling tyranny” in China with yet another deal that helps show mockery of the Chinese

LAST night we discovered some important facts about Microsoft helping Tunisia spy on citizens, more of less in the same way that Russian dissent was crushed with help from Microsoft. This is an appalling display of proprietary software in action. The news about Tunisia is actually based on a diplomatic leak which now receives a lot of extensive coverage. Well, our own post and the other one which we cited got many links/references to them and even the ‘press’ covered the issue after this had been revealed. See for example the article “Microsoft aided former Tunisian regime” as it says:

According to a cable sent by the US embassy in Tunis on 22 September, 2006, Microsoft was so keen to get the Tunisian government to drop its policy favouring open-source software that it agreed to set up a “program on cyber criminality” to cover training. The deal also entailed the company giving the Tunisian regime, headed by President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, the original source code for Microsoft software.

The cable was made public last week by Wikileaks as part of a massive and largely accidental publication of unredacted US embassy messages. In it, embassy officials told Washington there was a risk the training could be used to further oppress the Tunisian people.

“Through a program on cyber criminality, Microsoft will train government officials in the Ministries of Justice and Interior on how to use computers and the internet to fight crime. As part of this program, Microsoft will provide the GOT [Government of Tunisia] with original source codes for its program,” the cable read.
“In theory, increasing GOT law enforcement capability through IT training is positive, but given heavy-handed GOT interference in the internet, Post questions whether this will expand GOT capacity to monitor its own citizens,” it continued.

This leads us to today’s Cablegate cable, which shows how Microsoft bashes the intelligence and the education of the Chinese. China’s relationship with Bill Gates is a subject that we wrote about many times in the past, even several years ago. Watch his role in the following deal:

VZCZCXRO5403
RR RUEHCN RUEHGH
DE RUEHGZ #5379/01 1440829
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
R 240829Z MAY 06
FM AMCONSUL GUANGZHOU
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 8706
INFO RUEHOO/CHINA POSTS COLLECTIVE
RUCPDOC/USDOC WASHDC
RUEAIIA/CIA WASHDC
RUEKJCS/DIA WASHDC
RHHMUNA/HQ USPACOM HONOLULU HI
UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 02 GUANGZHOU 015379 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SENSITIVE 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: ECON, ETRD, EINV, EDUC, TNGD, CH 
SUBJECT: Microsoft Opens Technology Center in Guangzhou 
 
 
(U) This document is sensitive but unclassified.  Please 
protect accordingly. 
 
1. (SBU) Summary: Following on the heels of President Hu 
Jintao's meeting with Bill Gates in Seattle, Microsoft 
unveiled its first technology center in South China.  The 
center is the result of an agreement between Microsoft and 
the Chinese government to set up at least 10 such centers 
throughout China.  The center will develop software for e- 
governance, entertainment, and information systems security 
as well as provide training and consulting services to local 
government offices and enterprises.  The facility will 
eventually employ between 300 and 500 software engineers, 
though staff said they will be lucky to find 100 qualified 
candidates by the end of 2006.  End summary. 
 
Microsoft Makes a Deal 
---------------------- 
 
2. (SBU) Timothy Chen, corporate vice president and CEO of 
the Greater China region, was the ranking Microsoft 
representative at the ceremony on May 15.  In an aside to 
Consul General, Chen said he served as the interpreter 
during President Hu Jintao's April 2006 visit to Bill Gates' 
Seattle home.  The opening ceremony of the Guangzhou 
Technology Center was reportedly postponed until Hu returned 
from his visit to Seattle. 
 
3. (U) In his remarks, Chen said Microsoft and the Chinese 
government signed their first MOU in June 2002. Since then, 
Microsoft has provided training support to more than 30,000 
Chinese students and professionals free of charge.  In 
addition, Microsoft has outsourced USD 5.5 million worth of 
software products to Chinese partners.  Microsoft and the 
Chinese government signed their second MOU on Apr. 18, 2006 
during Hu's visit to Seattle.  Under this agreement, 
Microsoft will establish more than 10 technology centers in 
key cities in China to promote the advancement of 
information technology through cooperation with local 
software developers. 
 
And Now to Fill the Buildings... 
-------------------------------- 
 
4. (SBU) Microsoft's Guangdong research center is the first 
such center for Microsoft in South China, and others are 
planned for Shenzhen and Xiamen.  The center is located in 
Gaotang Software Park, on the fringes of the city in the 
fast-developing Tianhe District.  It occupies two mid-size 
buildings that are connected by an elevated pedestrian 
walkway and surrounded by grassy fields -- a miniature 
version of the Seattle campus.  According to company 
literature, the center's long-term goal is to employ between 
300 and 500 software engineers.  However, Microsoft 
representatives said informally that they would be lucky to 
find 100 qualified employees by the end of 2006 because of 
the dearth of well trained, experienced professionals in the 
field. 
 
5. (U) According to company literature, the center will 
provide services in software design, development, and 
support in the areas of e-governance, information security, 
and digital entertainment.  It will also provide training 
and consulting services for government agencies and 
enterprises, with the aim of developing Guangzhou's software 
industry. 
 
Big Plans for Guangzhou's Software Industry 
------------------------------------------- 
 
6. (U) Guangzhou Vice Mayor Shen Bonian noted in his remarks 
that Guangzhou is experiencing a shortage of high-tech 
talent, but said the city's 11th Five-Year Plan calls for 
more than 200,000 software technicians by 2010.  He said the 
Microsoft technology center will help nurture this much- 
needed talent and also assist in the informatization of 
Guangzhou government offices and enterprises.  Guangzhou's 
software industry is expected to generate more than 100 
billion RMB (USD 12.5 billion) in income by 2010, with an 
annual increase of 35 percent.  In comparison, software 
companies in Gaotang Software Park generated 10.5 billion 
RMB (USD 1.3 billion) of revenue from software sales in 
2005. 
 
Comment: A Political Necessity Hobbled by Educational 
Deficiencies 
--------------------------------------------- -------- 
 
 
GUANGZHOU 00015379  002 OF 002 
 
 
7. (SBU) This technology center, being the result of 
negotiations between Microsoft and the Chinese government, 
may serve Guangzhou's interests more than Microsoft's, 
though Microsoft sees the centers as being a political 
necessity for its future in China.  Though software 
localization and customer service are important for 
Microsoft's regional operations, the employment, training, 
and consulting services that this center will provide are a 
boon to Guangzhou's high-tech industry.  The remarks by 
Microsoft staff that the center's job openings will be 
difficult to fill reflect the deficit of well-trained, 
experienced professionals in Guangzhou's high-tech industry. 
Other contacts in the high-tech field have complained to us 
that young Chinese software developers have sufficient 
technical ability, but lack the talent to innovate -- owing 
in part to outdated teaching methods in China's 
universities. 
 
DONG 

A year ago Microsoft was accused in the US senate of “enabling tyranny” in China [1, 2]. █

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Cablegate: Government of Ireland Pushes Charlie McCreevy to Help Microsoft Against Antitrust Regulators

Posted in Antitrust, Europe, Microsoft at 8:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Familiar faces and sympathetic countries offer protection to a monopoly abuser

IRELAND is well known as Microsoft’s centre of tax dodge in Europe. The exchange is one of little or no benefit to the Irish economy (which not so long ago stood on its last leg), it’s about rich people trying to evade tax using loopholes and tax havens.

In a fascinating Cablegate cable, pro-software patents dunce Charlie McCreevy is being addressed indirectly. This is different from Austria's position:

VZCZCXRO7108
RR RUEHAG
DE RUEHDL #0335 0891457
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
R 301457Z MAR 06
FM AMEMBASSY DUBLIN
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 6705
INFO RUCNMEM/EU MEMBER STATES
RUEHBS/USEU BRUSSELS
C O N F I D E N T I A L DUBLIN 000335 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: DECL: 01/31/2015 
TAGS: ETRD, KIPR, EUN, EI 
SUBJECT: IRELAND SHARES USG CONCERNS ON MICROSOFT 
 
REF: A. STATE 46956 
 
     B. YOUNG-SOILA E-MAIL OF 3/13/06 
 
Classified By: Political-Economic Counselor Mary E. Daly; Reasons 1.4 ( 
B) and (D). 
 
(C) Ireland shares USG concerns about the Commission's 
treatment of Microsoft (which has its European operations 
center and large-scale R&D programs in Ireland), according to 
Ronald Long, Assistant Secretary General in the Department of 
Enterprise, Trade, and Employment (DETE), with whom Post 
discussed reftel demarche on March 28 and 29.  Long, who has 
responsibility for competition issues in DETE and claims to 
have written the 1991 EU Copyright Directive for Computer 
Programs, noted that DETE Minister Micheal Martin had 
recently written to EU Internal Market Commissioner (and 
former Irish Finance Minister) Charlie McCreevy to alert the 
Commission to the GOI's concerns.  Long elaborated that the 
GOI saw the Commission as less than transparent in its 
evaluation of the interoperability information supplied by 
Microsoft in compliance with the Commission's antitrust 
ruling.  The GOI, he added, worried that the Commission's 
dealings with Microsoft were making the ground rules for 
competition cases unclear, a trend that should concern any 
company operating in Europe.  He asked to stay in touch with 
Post as the Microsoft case proceeded. 
KENNY 

Got to love the part about “less than transparent” in relation to the EU Commission. Lack of transparency is actually the Microsoft problem which the EU Commission was trying to address. What is this, projection? █

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IRC Proceedings: September 5th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 8:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Enter the IRC channels now

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Links – Web Stats, Mego Petrospective, Tracking Company Busted, MPAA Exposed.

Posted in Site News at 1:30 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• Internet Explorer market share slips, even as IE9 usage grows

  IE has steadily lost market share over the last two years …

  Techflash puts as nice a spin on the situation as Microsoft could want, babbling on about Vista 7 and wonderful “experiences”. Robert Pogson astutely notices the growing difference between Net Applications and everyone else’s data,

  NetApplications hides its sample and indeed has just made the umpteenth wiggle to their data-analysis to try to keep that other OS over 90% share on the desktop… Clearly, they are not operating in the same universe [as wikipedia] with such divergent results.

• Cablegate

  • Wikileaks Sabotage

    As a perhaps unintended consequence of Domscheit-Berg’s sabotage of Wikileaks, a large collection of US cables has leaked without the Wikileaks redaction to remove names of individuals. The person Snorrason who is quoted as blaming this on Wikileaks itself is one of Domscheit-Berg’s associates.

  • Wikileaks confirms AFACT acted as a front for the MPAA in the iiNet case

    AFACT and MPAA worked hard to get Village Roadshow and the Seven Network to agree to be the public Australian faces on the case to make it clear there are Australian equities at stake, and this isn’t just Hollywood “bullying some poor little Australian ISP.” …

    Direct link to Cable

    AFACT/MPAA have hired Australia’s top copyright lawyer, Michael Williams of Gilbert & Tobin, to represent them in
    this case. Williams, well-known to the Mission and highly
    respected in the Australian legal community, was the lawyer
    behind the successful Cooper and Kazaa IPR cases in
    Australia. … Ellis did not want to begin by tangling with Telstra, Australia’s former telecom monopoly and still-dominant player in telephony and internet, and a company with the financial
    resources and demonstrated willingness to fight hard and
    dirty, in court and out.)

    As usual, if you actually fight, you win.

Finance

• US authorities to sue big banks over sub-prime crisis

  The agency overseeing the remains of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac seeks billions of dollars in compensation from banks … including Bank of America, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, as early as Friday.

• Anti-Trust

  • Antitrust nemesis accuses Google of ‘WMD program’

    PJ calls out The Register and Microsoft in this latest round of FUD, intentionally not linked.

    Perchance Metz forgot to mention the Microsoft connection? Well, that’s what Groklaw is for. Here’s some background on who is really behind all this Google-smear/accusation nonsense. Note that Google has pointed out that Foundem is backed by ICOMP, an organization funded largely by Microsoft. I don’t know about you, but I’m mighty sick of Microsoft’s Machiavellian ways.

    Any advertiser that hands me Foundem, Bing, Yahoo or any other Microsoft related promotion has failed.

  • A federal agency may have violated U.S. procurement laws when it selected Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s products over Google Inc. (GOOG)’s without full competition for a planned $59.3 million e-mail services contract

  • MeeGo Deathwatch: Intel Reportedly to Discontinue Development

    Our Linux expert, Joe Brockmeier (known in the Linux community as Zonker) said that Intel and Nokia have “done everything entirely wrong, from start to finish” when it came to MeeGo. They put obstacles in the way for developers and innovation was hampered. When Moblin and Maemo were merged, the Linux community was not entirely behind the move and developers were discouraged from making changes that were not under the thumb of either Intel or Nokia. … MeeGo was supposed to be Intel’s way to tie an operating system to a chip and create a device line that would be entirely Atom. … was designed as a response to mobile devices not supporting Intel’s Atom line of mobile processors.

    Nokia should have run with ARM and Maemo when they had the market to themselves. Listening to Intel was fatal.

• Censorship

  • Pakistan officially bans encrypted traffic.

    US and other ISPs that block or slow encrypted traffic are no better.

• Privacy

  • Using remote tracking software to find stolen laptop may have violated federal wiretap statute

    It is one thing to cause a stolen computer to report its IP address or its geographical location in an effort to track it down. It is something entirely different to violate federal wiretapping laws by intercepting the electronic communications of the person using the stolen laptop.

    The company was obviously staffed by bored people looking for titillation. That they occasionally catch thieves is no assurance that they won’t be spying on other people, such as this inadvertent receiver of stolen property, or the laptop’s owner. Non free software always has the power to spy and can not be trusted.

  • Cory Doctorow, Google Plus forces us to discuss identity.

    The first duty of social software is to improve its users’ social experience. Facebook’s longstanding demand that its users should only have one identity is either a toweringly arrogant willingness to harm people’s social experience in service to doctrine; or it is a miniature figleaf covering a huge, throbbing passion for making it easier to sell our identities to advertisers. Google has adopted the Facebook doctrine at the very moment in which the figleaf slipped, when people all over the world are noticing that remaking ancient patterns of social interaction to conform to advertising-driven dogma exposes you to everything from humiliation at school to torture in the cells of a Middle Eastern despot. There could be no stupider moment for Google to subscribe to the gospel of Zuckerberg, and there is no better time for Google to show us an alternative.

• Civil Rights

  • US DHS has been developing mobile backscatter xray units to scan crowds of people without knowledge or consent.

    The documents also reveal that the mobile backscatter machines cannot be American National Standards Institute “certified people scanners” because of the high level of radiation output and because subjects would not know they have been scanned.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • The Problem with Medical Patents

    So great is the perceived threat to medical research that a group of American doctors and scientists have issued a protest saying: “The use of patents or exorbitant licensing fees to prevent physicians and clinical laboratories from performing genetic tests limits access to medical care, jeopardizes the quality of medical care, and unreasonably raises its cost.” Once a patent has been issued on a drug or discovery, scientists must pay outrageous licensing fees in order to do further research in the given area, thus preventing the development of cures due to lack of funding.

  • Copyrights

    • Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Monopoly

      Sarkozy believes that the right to an intellectual monopoly – the right to *exclude* people from knowledge – is absolutely equal to the fundamental right to freedom. … Sarkozy seems to regard supporting his fat-cat chums in the copyright industries as more important that truly helping the broader culture French culture, or even – heaven forfend – supporting universal ideals like freedom.

    • The war on sharing takes a nasty turn in Finland. Police raided a man and confiscated his computers. He later paid 900 euros and ten days of wages to avoid court costs and delays.

      In addition to getting police involved in minor file-sharing cases, CIAPC are also sending out pre-settlement letters to alleged infringers. In 2010 the group sent out around 100 letters and have promised to double that in 2011.

      Music is the target of this extortion but the laws apply equally to journals and other more serious material.

    • No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion?

      Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country’s industrial might. … Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion — unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century. … The market for scientific literature didn’t collapse even as copyright law gradually became established in Germany in the 1840s. German publishers did, however, react to the new situation in a restrictive way reminiscent of their British colleagues, cranking up prices and doing away with the low-price market.

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Links 5/9/2011: Android 3.2 Tablets, Cablegate Everywhere

Posted in News Roundup at 11:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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What We Learn From Novell’s Patents

Posted in Antitrust, Novell, Patents at 11:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: News of interest about patents that relate to Novell and harm GNU/Linux or Free software

NOVELL’S patents are a ticking time bomb that can basically be used by foes of Linux at any time. Software patents are without exception a bad thing, including all of IBM’s, Google’s, and Red Hat’s. As long as patents can be passed around as though they are a property, there is no telling who is going to ‘own’ them in their whole 20-year lifespan.

As FT reminds us in this new article, the prices of patents — including Novell’s — seem high because these are increasingly being used to block competition:

As we suggested a few weeks ago, the high prices bid recently for patents from Novell and Nortel will have prompted many others to dust off their IP portfolios. Since then, Eastman Kodak’s shares have bounced on news that it has begun seeking a buyer for some of its patents and Motorola Mobility has sold at a huge premium to Google.

Google has basically raised the perceived value of patents, helped legitimise some patents, and it did not even achieve all that much given that its foes are now using patent trolls like MOSAID as proxies. Mind the fact that pro-Microsoft, anti-Android lobbyist Florian Müller has sent me 20 un-responded dents in Identi.ca. this afternoon, trying to heckle me while justifying consulting services to patent trolls (perhaps his clients).

The issue here is not just Microsoft or even Apple; it is the law that they are exploiting and exploring in an attempt to ban or tax the competition, to the point where they can win not based on merit but based on market distortion. Rather than good programmers competing against one another, the competition is being passed to parasitical patent lawyers and lobbyists. No wonder the economy is doing so poorly with high unemployment rates and monopolistic billionaires who grow richer than ever before (they use patent monopolies).

Watch this new gem about Novell and a patent troll:

LL: There’s a famous re-exam petition involving Roger Billings. He tried to enter a licensing deal with Novell. The company sent in about 600 pages of what they claimed as prior art. But only one pertained to Billings

Instead of producing 600 pages of so-called “prior art” (a cause of nature), one could just produce 60,000 lines of good code that actually achieves something. Too much money is being drained in courtrooms, feeding a meta-industry that serves almost nobody except itself. Politicians too are basically being trained in the art of arguing and as long as they manage to engage with a dialogue against another side — no matter if they win the argument or not — they bill someone at the sidelines. Sadly, almost all politicians are lawyers or former businessmen. Is this the vision and future that we want? What about the billionaires who use those confrontations to marginalise competition too fearful of being sued because it cannot bear the legal costs?

Well, as we mentioned before, we are hopeful that there will be some real patent reform in the United States as a new antitrust chief turned out to have been involved in the CPTN fiasco:

Pozen joined the Antitrust Division in February 2009 as chief of staff and counsel. She was the lead antitrust lawyer in the CPTN/Novell case, which involved a group of tech firms including Microsoft and Apple being forced to license old Novell patents to the open-source community.

How about defanging them in all cases? Ensuring that Apple and Microsoft cannot abuse the patent system as they do to harm Linux? Pozen is smart enough to see the antitrust violations here, especially by Microsoft. █

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As Attachmate Distances Itself From SUSE, Commitment to UNIX Copyrights Doubted

Posted in GNU/Linux, IBM, Patents, SCO, UNIX at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Bad signs appear as Attachmate puts SUSE aside but continues to ‘hoard’ UNIX rights, dissociating one’s importance to the other

ATTACHMATE has been ensuring that it can maintain its status as a proprietary software company. Executives who were committed to a different agenda were mostly removed, expelled, or simply left. Mono developers were fired without exception and SUSE was relocated and relegated to Germany, where developers are now dependent on funding from Microsoft. What is actually left in Attachmate which is “open source”? Even Vibe was axed as we had predicted all along; it was in part based on Free software from Google (Wave).

Attachmate, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is putting new people in charge and the Deccan Herald (insisting on just Internet Explorer or Netscape even in 2011) speaks about the spinoff called SUSE, which is basically partly funded by Microsoft now (to help put Microsoft tax on GNU/Linux servers). Attachmate is also the ‘owner’ of early UNIX copyrights, according to this latest report which adds:

“Novell’s board of directors adopted a resolution approving the sale, which specifically mentioned the copyrights were to be retained by Novell,” the judges said in the opinion.

This was the second time the appeals court ruled on this case. In the first appeal it reversed a lower-court ruling in Novell’s favor and sent the case back. After a two-week trial, the jury ruled Novell owned the copyrights. SCO appealed.

A spokeswoman for Linden, Utah-based SCO, Chantell Ferrin, didn’t immediately reply to messages seeking comment.

There is also a derailed analysis behind an apparent paywall at Lexology. We are still not sure what Attachmate will do with these copyrights. It is not as though the company has any commitment to Free software or to UNIX. Given the amount of time and money Novell has invested in this case, it is rather unlikely that UNIX will just be left there to rot and bring no revenue to Attachmate, even if through a sale. Unlike Novell, Attachmate has no need to keep up appearance and keep UNIX away from enemies of Linux. Will these be sold to IBM maybe? Or perhaps to some foe of Red Hat? This is a question that has generally bothered us since 2007 and we wrote about it many times before. We must pay attention to Attachmate’s actions and statements. █

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Shrinking of Novell

Posted in Novell at 10:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A post-Attachmate acquisition Novell and the former CEO’s remark about employee arrogance

IT was just under a year ago that Novell seemed destined to be sold. The sale was assured a few months later and the acquisition closed about 4-5 months ago, whereupon many employees were let loose. Ron Hovsepian lost his job after he had failed to fulfil his role as CEO and only 4 years after shaking Steve Ballmer’s hand a company with over 4,000 employees became more or less liquidated, with its patents being passed to Microsoft and some of its staff being absorbed inside Attachmate.

Now that an unemployment epidemic strikes the West, reports give this personal account of a formal Novell employee:

The numbers didn’t fall fast enough for Robert Ahlstrom. He spent four years working for the software company Novell – one of Provo Utah’s most prominent businesses. Novell laid off more than 800 people in May, sending shockwaves through the city.

“My boss, he called me into the office and told me: ‘You’re one of the people that’s gonna be laid off,’” Robert says.

Robert says he’s lucky – he’s getting severance pay. Now he spends his days looking for work — and working on his baseball swing.

In last week’s news we also found former Novell staff and former advisors finding themselves in other companies. former Novell CEO Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying some interesting things:

On lessons learned from working at Sun and Novell: “What happens when you’re in a successful company is you develop a certain kind of arrogance.” There’s always someone who can undercut you with a cheaper machine that works just as well. At Google, they understand this, because most of their price lists start at “Free.”

Several years ago we wrote about that particular arrogance that harmed Novell. A columnist at IDG wrote a column about it.

It is valuable to learn about people who are leaving the company or got laid off as it often provides insight into the internal issues. Consider this other new report which says:

Burnham joins Ogletree after seven years in-house at Novell Inc., where she most recently served as vice president of global employment law.

Employment at Novell or Attachmate is perhaps not much of a priority now. As we recently pointed out, Novell products are currently being decommissioned if not improperly maintained. It is unlikely that Novell-affiliated people or products will ever grow. Right now all the ‘juice’ that’s left in Novell is merely being squeezed out, starting with those patents Novell gave to Microsoft through CPTN. What a waste and what a predictable mess. Novell oughtn’t have gone into Microsoft’s bed in the first place; it had a fine desktop distribution with major clients, but it blew it all away, so Canonical won. It ought to be added that all those Mono developers who got laid off are not really visible in that startup called Xamarin. It seems like a non-starter. Their business model is providing Microsoft-esque services or products to developers and users who are trying to distance themselves from Microsoft and its platform. Similarly, Novell was trying to offer a Microsoft-flavoured GNU/Linux to companies and individuals whose goal was to get rid of Microsoft. █

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