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VIRTUALISATION Patent suit tells us why we should shun Mono, Moonlight
VIRTUALISATION Patent suit tells us why we should shun Mono, Moonlight | Patent suit tells us why we should shun Mono, Moonlight |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 27 February 2009 | |
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For the uninitiated, Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET development environment created by GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza, who is now a vice-president at the "mixed-source company" , Novell. Moonlight is a clone of Microsoft's Silverlight, using which the company hopes to capture the market that is dominated by Adobe's Flash. (Why go after Flash? There's a long story in that and one I'll touch on some other day.) Whenever people raise the possibility that Mono or Moonlight may be found to be in violation of Microsoft's patents one day, the stock answer provided by defenders is that the standards that govern the software are submitted to ECMA and are thus public in the case of Mono; when it comes to Moonlight, people point to this. One can only laugh cynically. But when de Icaza himself is asked about such things, the answer becomes a bit more complicated. At the MIX 08 conference in Las Vegas, de Icaza explained during a discussion that one could download Moonlight from Novell and be protected by its licensing of Silverlight codecs through its own cross-licensing agreement. He was then asked by Mozilla engineering vice-president Mike Schroepfer whether there would be the same protection if one downloaded and then distributed the code for Moonlight "There is a patent covenant for anyone that downloads [Moonlight] from Novell," he answered and was then forced to admit that "as to extending the patents to third parties - you have to talk to Microsoft." That's exactly what Microsoft was saying to TomTom before it sued the GPS maker on Wednesday - talk to us and sign a licensing deal. Is that what FOSS users want to do - pay royalties for using software? It is important to note that a week or so back, Microsoft was inking a virtualisation deal with Red Hat; in recent times, the company has made much of what it terms its willingness to deal with open source, to the extent of sending its people to free software events. But the reality is different - lawsuits and the proprietary software business model are part of Microsoft's DNA and it cannot change. A couple more points about Microsoft and FOSS - the company has no problem about people running free and open software on Windows. It loves packages released under free-for-all licences like the BSD licence so that it can take the code and lock it up. Microsoft itself releases some software under licences it defines as open source but there is always a standard condition - you can use it only for non-commercial purposes. |
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