Sam Varghese
Monday, 10 March 2008 22:26
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
It is amazing how he deliberately blinds himself to all that has happened in the past and appears to unwaveringly trust a convicted Monopolist (capital letter intended).
There's plenty of history, both on the net and in numerous well-written tomes, about the way Microsoft manoeuvred its way to its present position of dominance - yet here we have a developer who is widely acknowledged to be one of the best around refusing to examine the evidence.
Programmers are said to be masters of logic - why does that logic disappear when de Icaza comes up against Microsoft's minions? It reminds me of an intelligent woman who is in love with a gangster and hence unable to see the man's flaws.
During this discussion, someone even compares de Icaza to Linus Torvalds, claiming that both are interested only in the merits of a technology. This is disingenuous at best. For starters, Torvalds has never budged from keeping the kernel under a licence which permits modification and re-distribution; de Icaza's Mono project will only accept code for the core components under a licence similar to the BSD licences, where one can take a snippet, modify it and then lock it up in proprietary software without any requirement to give it back.
Comparing the two men is silly but let me just point out one more obvious difference - Torvalds is frank, to the point and straightforward in his speech. He calls a spade a spade while de Icaza runs away from hard questions and is a master of the art of spin.
It is worth noting that any protection from patent claims by Microsoft is only offered to users of Novell's Linux distribution - and that too only for five years from November 2006 onwards unless the companies sign a fresh deal.
