Does this protect Mono from Microsoft? [LWN.net]

Does this protect Mono from Microsoft?

Posted Nov 3, 2006 21:15 UTC (Fri) by gravious (subscriber, #7662)
In reply to: Does this protect Mono from Microsoft? by xylifyx
Parent article: Various responses to Microsoft/Novell

Ah hah! There was always this lingering suspicion of Mono running afoul of some MS .Net patent mines. Novell is invested heavily in Mono - this makes tons of sense for them. Also they were one of the first to indemnify against SCO and now they can claim that they are indemnified against the MS patent horde. On principal I think everyone in the Open Source community would rather commit hari kiri than cut a deal with Bill Gates and his minions but we must realise that Novell has been in this business a long time and that they have a lot of assets to protect.

Though I do not use Suse I have seen nothing that would indicate Novell is anything but keen on expanding it's role in the Open Source world. I think caution is wise but the amount of nay-sayers on LWN is a bit depressing at times. Oracle/RedHat - good riddance RH! MS/Novell - good riddance Novell! Just remember all the passionate Open Source/Free Software people these companies employ - they must have some influence on their future directions. Let's not keep yelling "The sky is falling!" every time a commercial deal is struck.

I genuinely believe nothing can stem the flow of one of the most altruistic movements I know. Between the Open Content and Open Source we will pry the fruits of our labour from the greedy hands of those whose sole aim in life is the headlong pursuit of Mammon. You know, their is no end to this struggle (I believe that fervently!) We are just a continuation of any movement that values collaboration/cooperation and sharing more than proprietary gain. Nobody walks blindfolded into a deal with MS these days unless they missed the last 15 years of computing which Novell obviously have not considering they swallowed up arguably the second best distribution out there - barring the rise of Ubuntu.

In other news, have you seen MS has shared source[1] all 3.9 million lines of the new Win CE? Now _that_ is news and a genuinely competitive move to cut off Linux in the embedded space

whaddya reckon?

Anthony

1: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6932977445.html

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Does this protect Mono from Microsoft?

Posted Nov 6, 2006 21:04 UTC (Mon) by gravious (subscriber, #7662) [Link]

Mmm. Samba. You know Microsoft must be just dreading Samba 4[1] :) Tridge is an-uber hacker and Microsoft should be rightly quaking in their collective boots. oo.org - I dislike the java-fication this has gotten recently. This was definitely a political maneuver to get Sun's grubby little language into a large code base. If I'm wrong I apologise. <rant>Java and .Net are closed source solutions to the problem of portability that is answered most effectively by shared source. I mean you have to see the JVM and the CLR as _platforms_ like x86 and mips. We need less not more platforms (especially considering only a few languages can target that platform - in this respect .Net is way less sucky than Java). They are both interesting. They both kinda suck. Technically you could almost write an open source OS on top of either of them, perish the thought. If they're sooo great why isn't Firefox rewritten in Java or .Net, hmmm?</rant>

I thought Samba was completely reverse engineered so it should be okay. Also Sun can and will defend oo.org, Novell is smaller than Sun - I say Mono was giving their lawyers the screaming wotsits!

respect,
Anthony

1 - http://us5.samba.org/samba/ftp/samba4/