What bothers me is that all this FUD from Ballmer would not be possible were it not for the fact that Novell went on its knees in November last year and signed a deal with Microsoft. This deal has given Ballmer the licence to keep dropping insidious hints about possible Microsoft IP in GNU/Linux.

What are the good folk at Novell, the "mixed-source company", doing when Ballmer flings around these wild allegations? Miguel de Icaza, the top open source man at Novell, heads the Mono project which is trying to implement Microsoft's .NET framework on GNU/Linux. On the day Ballmer began to spew these allegations, the Mono project announced that it had developed a Visual Basic compiler to help developers who use Microsoft Visual Basic to run their applications on any platform that supports Mono, such as Linux, without any code modifications.

Sure, that's the crying need of the hour. We need to get closer to Microsoft in every way to ensure the future progress of GNU/Linux.

De Icaza is an ardent supporter of the deal with Microsoft. He is conspicuously silent when Ballmer vents in this manner. The same goes for the Novell chief executive, Ron Hovsepian.

This, by the way, is the same de Icaza who co-founded the GNOME desktop project. His reason? The existing desktop enviroment, KDE, was based on a proprietary toolset, Qt. Given what de Icaza supports today, it looks as though there are two people with the same name.

Some words which the good people at Novell may like to think about occasionally - it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

{moscomment}

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Intellectual property rights  Linux  Microsoft  Novell  Open Source  Sam Varghese  Torvalds