Some interesting bits of his blog entry in which De Icaza replies to emails he has received concerning the Novell-Microsoft deal: "I do not know of any patents which Mono infringes. (...) Although I did not take part of the actual negotiations, and was only told about this deal less than a week before the announcement, I had been calling for a long time for a collaboration between Microsoft and Open Source and Microsoft and Novell. (...) Similar deals have been done in the past, in 1997 Microsoft signed a similar deal with Apple, and Apple used that agreement and the incoming monies to turn the company around. Sun signed a similar agreement with Microsoft in 2004, which at the time I realized enabled Sun to ship Mono on Solaris (which we already supported at that time)."
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Member since:2005-07-13
There are plenty of dumb CIOs out there who'll drink this without questions, smart move Novell
There are also smart CIO's working for Sarbox-encumbered companies, and deployment of technology with a hazy IP provision is a risk best not taken. This move at least clarifies things for organizations intent on compliance.
It's been brought up that Microsoft rarely actually sues people over IP infringement, but the point being overlooked is that they don't need to. The simple implication that they can is sufficient to prevent organizations from infringing. That was the tactic SCO basically attempted, and if IBM and Novell hadn't immediately jumped out of the gate with both guns blazing, the FUD may have succeeded if allowed to grow.
So Novell made a strategic business decision. I don't agree with it, and I'm doubtful it will be successful, but I can't deny the business logic in it.
The irony is that, at least IMHO, this taints the mono project. Certainly SLED/SLES customers are clearly protected. I suspect that the patent issues hanging over mono's head due to the MS-like technologies just got murkier for the rest of the community. Yes, C# is ECMA. We get that. But what about the rest of the .net stack, winforms et al.? Where do you draw the line? What can SLED users/developers do that Ubuntu can't, or OpenSuse for that matter, since it's seperate from the agreement? OIN was supposed to be the buffer there, of which Novell was a major contributor, and that was the move that even convinced Red Hat to cave with mono in Fedora. Why this move now?
And the bigger irony is that mono dependencies are now part of Gnome, the project that grew out of a belief that license payments to Trolltech were bad because the technology should be free.
I'm not saying that mono is a road to patent hell, frankly I don't know enough about the technology to say for sure, but as someone that wasn't sure before I'm even more confused now.
Member since:
2006-08-24
Wouldn't linux vendors banding together to offer indemnification make more sense?
This agreement is more like a marketing tool for Novell sales people over Redhat, saying "we have agreements with Microsoft"
There are plenty of dumb CIOs out there who'll drink this without questions, smart move Novell