Microsoft Office lock-in and the deal with Novell (Linux Journal)

Posted Dec 11, 2006 6:22 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

""The Mono project is based on .NET, which in turn is an attempt to extinguish Java after MSFT wasn't allowed to extend Java after embracing it. Significantly, the .NET project postdates the "Halloween Memo" which suggested that Microsoft use software patents to attack free/open source software.""

It could be that Microsoft had it's license to use Java pulled by Sun and then was sued by Sun for it.

Do you think that had something to do with the creation of .NET?

""Mono was never necessary, the manpower would have been better spent on a free implmenation of Java, which may well have forced Sun to GPL theirs sooner.""

There was considurable doubt that sun would ever GPL Java. And still even though they promise to release a big portion of it is only going to cover specific versions of Java and is going to have a lot of holes in it's functionality that will have to be filled.

A free open soruce Java without Sun's aproval is much much more legally dubious then Mono. Sun has lots of patents on it I would expect and Java was never intended to be made by anybody else but Sun and people who license the java code directly buy Sun. C# on the other hand was made a recognized standard and it was expected that people would make copies of it.

A free open source java is likely every bit of patent encumbered as a free open source C#.

Now if you knew for certain back then (which was extremely doubtfull, even until very recently) that you could force Sun's hand by creating a slightly incompatable free software java then it still doesn't make a lick of sense what your saying.

I guess if I follow all those PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, etc etc developers are all morons also because they too could be devoting all their efforts at making a GPL'd java language instead of making yet another high level language and wasting everybody else's time with needless diversity.

For Linux to succeed in markets were Windows currently dominates it not only needs to be cheaper and better then Windows, it has to have the same functionality and more functionality then what Windows offers.

Nobody is going to spend 300,000 dollars in retraining, staff downtime (as I suppose would happen as you have all the programmers learn new languages in their spare time), new applications, new work flows, new ways of running their data centers and managing their users to save 20,000 dollars they could get by switching to Linux.

Novel knows this more then anybody and it's critical to their future that Linux succeeds. That's all they want at this point.

For example:
You need to have the ability to read archived data. You need the ability to exchange documents between departments and between business partners.

You just can't go "Oh, ya I know that your using the industry standard for storing data that 99.7% of everybody else uses, but I am afraid that I can't use that because, you see, it's propriatory and I don't want to get locked into buying Microsoft software. Plus Microsoft is big and scares me. Try OpenOffice.org; it'll only cost you days in lost productivity to make the switch, but ODF is a ISO standard! (and I would be able start reading the spreadsheets in your emails again)"

Novell could of just kept all their compatability add-ons propriatory (like 90% of the 'Linux companies') and avoided a lot of flak and would of gotten a lot of customers locked into what they make, but they open sourced them and they want other people to adopt them.

Sure they f-ed up with the Novell-Microsoft agreement, but it could of been worse. At least they weren't violating the GPL like some companies do in a effort to appeal to Windows users.