Summary: Further analysis of Microsoft's new Moonlight covenant reveals more items that divide and dilute the Free software community

Miguel de Icaza and his friends at Microsoft did a lot of PR to distract journalists from the truth about Moonlight. They strive to make XAML more widespread, primarily at the expense of web standards.

More than 10 holes in the latest Moonlight covenant have already been identified [1, 2] and The Source has just found several more. Its maintainer, Jason, has this to say:

I have to admit I am surprised that the new covenant is so bad. I expected a new covenant – even Miguel de Icaza hinted that the old one was less-than-ideal (scathing criticism from him as far as Microsoft is concerned) – but what I was expecting was basically the old covenant with a restriction or two removed!

Instead what we have is something that tries to look more “Open”, but is filled with Novell-Only anti-community language stronger than the previous version!

That's right. Microsoft is trying to divide people, understanding rather well the impact this would have. Richard Stallman has always warned about a state where users are left "helpless and divided".

Microsoft's "open source" is still fake, but more gullible journalists [1, 2] are buying Microsoft's story. To give a new example:

2009 was a momentous and turbulent year in Microsoft's history. It made its entrance into cloud computing, and broke convention by donating source code to Linux.

Well, actually, Microsoft violated the GPL, so this move was an accident and a required one [1, 2, 3]. It's hardly a "donation", it's just compliance. As for Moonlight, it's more of a trap -- one that Novell is required to deliver for its paymasters from Redmond. ⬆