03.24.07
Does Novell Spread Its Mono Along with FUD?
It is very easy to let these things escape our attention, but every now and then, Novell selfishly lifts itself above rivals by boasting superiority on purely-litigious grounds. Here is one such case from yesterday’s news.
On Friday, the first race in the Race to Linux 2.0 began. The goal is to get an application developed with Visual Studio for ASP.NET
2.0 ported to Linux.[…]
Now that Mono does not have to fear lawsuits from Microsoft, it can overcome the barriers that lawyers set up and programmers fear in many market segments.
If you look carefully at the wording, this actually comes from Novell, which supposedly ‘protected’ itself from lawsuits. How can Miguel de Icaza, who persistently (even in our Web site) insists that Mono carries no legal burden, actually defend this? Once again, Novell tries to brag about some sort of legal ‘purity’, thereby smearing the reputation of the code in general and casting an ugly shadow on other Linux distributors. Can you blame Red hat for rejecting Mono?
Moving on, LinuxWorld has an article that gives a disappointingly one-sided coverage. It mentions nothing but interoperability and ignores the community’s opposition, not to mention that other ‘feature’ of that great deal. Conversely, ECT has an article which echoes Perens’ words and suggests that Novell could one day become a Microsoft subsidiary.
Only a handful of reporters attended the briefing across the street from BrainShare where software developer Bruce Perens criticized Novell’s relationship with Microsoft. He said the results of the partnership could doom Novell to becoming a Microsoft subsidiary because Novell does not write its own software but gets it instead from small independents.
These arguably far-fetched predictions seem to repeat themselves, despite the consistent denial.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
shane said,
March 24, 2007 at 10:04 am
This will only move developers further away from Mono, who wants to commit to a platform that Novell has now admitted needs MS licensing?
Plus, even if what he says is true, then it’s only safe for five years, and then what?
I have said it before, the demise of Mono is good for Free Software..