OSNews > Thread > "Interesting" by dark child

Novell's de Icaza Criticizes Microsoft Patent Deal

Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 7th Mar 2008 21:38 UTC, submitted by SReilly

Open-source pioneer and Novell Vice President Miguel de Icaza Thursday for the first time publicly slammed his company's cross-patent licensing agreement with Microsoft as he defended himself against lack of patent protection for third parties that distribute his company's Moonlight project, which ports Microsoft's Silverlight technology to Linux.

4 37 Comment(s)

http://osne.ws/ezz

Thread beginning with comment 303810
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.

Interesting

by dark child on Fri 7th Mar 2008 21:51 UTC

Member since:
2005-12-09

That's an interesting development because DeIcaza is usually pro Microsoft.

Reply Permalink Bookmark Score: 8

RE: Interesting

by Eugenia on Fri 7th Mar 2008 21:57 in reply to "Interesting"

Member since:
2005-06-28

He is not "pro" anything. He always tries to be objective, so he sees things from afar, rather than getting all psyched with his own position, or OSS' position, or Microsoft's position. This is why I like Miguel.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 0

Amen!

by TLZ_ on Fri 7th Mar 2008 22:15 in reply to "RE: Interesting"

Member since:
2007-02-05

I really really respect Miguel. Although he is an idealist he is also practical. He wants good tech just as much as he wants ideology(freedom).

Futhermore he never seems to have allready choses sides on anything. He always considers and he sees good and bad on both sides. *As is it (obviously) really is*

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

Read more of this thread...

RE[2]: Interesting

by buff on Sat 8th Mar 2008 00:23 in reply to "RE: Interesting"

Member since:
2005-11-12

Eugenia, I agree with you Miguel is not pro anything. Possibly dealing with Microsoft and expecting the relationship to be beneficial to each party is usually a mistake. Microsoft deals with others when it has the upper hand.

Edited 2008-03-08 00:24 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 6

RE[2]: Interesting

by segedunum on Sat 8th Mar 2008 01:01 in reply to "RE: Interesting"

Member since:
2005-07-06

He is not "pro" anything. He always tries to be objective, so he sees things from afar, rather than getting all psyched with his own position, or OSS' position, or Microsoft's position.

I'm not entirely sure who you've got him mixed up with. For good or for bad, and people can come up with all the conspiracy theories they like, he has always had a puzzling and burning admiration for what Microsoft comes up with. Whether it be Gnumeric and Excel, Mono and .Net or support for OOXML, he is anything but objective. His bizarre support for OOXML was widely discredited, and around the time Mono was created he even started regurgitating a lot of Microsoft marketing material on .Net, such as ASP.Net being used to write 80% less code than anything else.

It just appears that Miguel is now backtracking somewhat, and if you read the debate:

http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2008/030608-mix-novells-de-icaza-cri...

A lot of it looks quite painful and difficult to reconcile. He even comes up with this gem:

"The patent piece is such a small piece of it," de Icaza said. "I don't think Windows and Linux are relevant in the long term. They might be fantastic products ... but Google has shown itself to be a cash cow. There is a feature beyond selling corporate [software] and patents ... it's going to be owning end users."

Owning end users? That's not really a logical response to..........anything.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 19