Summary: The FSFE's president writes about Mono and Novell's former employee writes about Novell versus gratis

THE FSF has already expressed its opinion about Mono and Samba's Jeremy Allison did so too [1, 2, 3]. He wrote about the subject several days ago (he also put it in ZDNet, as usual, under the headline "Mono-mania: It's risky business").

With apparent endorsement from the founder of the FSFE (in Identi.ca), the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) brought attention to Allison's analysis.

The core problem is that Mono implements technology that is very likely patented by Microsoft. Microsoft, in its turn, has now started to aggressively enforce its software patents, as shown by its lawsuit against TomTom earlier this year.

Former Novell employee Matt Asay is the third person to compare Novell to Avis [1, 2], so if "try harder" refers to trying to get GNU/Linux vendors sued or bullied by Microsoft, then sure, Novell tries harder.

Novell has been positioning itself as the Avis of Linux, a distant but gaining Red Hat competitor that "tries harder." Like Oracle, Novell argues that it can give customers Red Hat value at a lower price.

There's just one problem with this marketing spin: the "low-cost alternative" to Red Hat isn't Novell. It's CentOS. And CentOS is free as in $0.00.

Boycott Novell runs on a CentOS server whose cost (the software) is $0.00. Microsoft and Novell would like to change that by adding software patent tax. Some people still wonder how Novell harms GNU/Linux. ⬆