01.31.10
Novell and Freedom Are Incompatible
Summary: Novell’s obsession with Microsoft (and even Apple) is highlighted using the latest evidence
Last week we wrote about Novell promoting Apple with .NET [1, 2]. Mono is quite naturally a tool that favours proprietary software stacks. Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza created it after he had created GNOME and like many people at Novell, he is fixated on Apple too (in the sense that he likes it), not just Microsoft/Windows. Previously, he complained about Mac OS X people taking more control, but later he drifted away from Freedom and went further into Microsoft’s arms. He even got himself appointed and admitted into the board of Microsoft’s CodePlex Foundation. Being a Microsoft celebrity might help him in some communities other than the Free software one/s.
Here is Charlotte Betterley from Novell’s PR department promoting de Icaza’s work on Apple iPad and .NET. It’s like company policy, not just the infatuations of one man:
Enter MonoTouch. MonoTouch is a software development kit that will enable iPad developers to utilize code and libraries written for the .NET development framework and easier-to-use programming languages such as C#. Microsoft .NET developers will be able to use MonoTouch while fully complying with Apple’s license terms.
We have already written 3 separate posts about why iPad is an enemy of one’s freedom [1, 2, 3]. Nat Friedman, who left Novell some weeks ago, is apparently buying one. Friedman is probably Miguel’s closest colleague and friend (they both founded Ximian) and he also uses an iPhone based on his latest blog post where he makes a reference to “toys” (reminiscent of notorious remarks made about Mono+Windows a few years ago):
Sleep Cycles. This is an iPhone app that uses the iPhone accelerometer to track your sleep. You put it near your pillow and when you toss and turn at night it knows. You set a wake-up time and it rings an alarm to wake you up before your deadline when you’re in a period of light sleep, and will wake up more easily.
This is the type of management overseeing FOSS development at Novell. They are preoccupied with proprietary software and there is a lot of .NET content in SUSE Planet, for example these two posts from Jonathan Pryor’s blog. It’s like this every week.
Gabriel Burt’s blog (he works for Novell) gives this release schedule and announcement of the release of Banshee 1.5.3. So does Aaron Bockover, who raves about “the return of OS X support”. Need it be added that Banshee is a Novell-developed and Novell-only Mono program because of the limits in Microsoft's community promise?
Sandy from Novell has just released this new version of Tomboy, adding Windows-only features to Tomboy (for Vista 7 even, despite the fact that it is scarcely used).
Probably the coolest new feature in this release, courtesy of Stefan Cosma, is support for Windows 7 Jump Lists, which are totally awesome and should be added to GNOME.
Yay. Windows. Gotta love Mono.
So for those Tomboy users who prefer the better/full “Mono experience”, Tomboy is there with more features but only on Windows. We have always said that Mono is helping Windows, not GNU/Linux [1, 2, 3]. It promotes the notion of GNU/Linux as a second-class platform. █
