Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 10:20
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Over the past week, a couple of events have served to highlight the extent to which Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza is helping Microsoft to implement its strategy of curbing the growth of free and open source software.
However, one is yet to see anyone drawing this obvious conclusion - it almost looks like people don't want to face up to the obvious.
On September 10, Microsoft
announced it was setting up the CodePlex Foundation, a business grouping but disarmingly sitting at a .org domain. (Something like Slashdot, which claims to be a community site and also uses .org as its primary domain suffix).
And on Monday, Novell
announced the release of MonoTouch, a commercial toolkit for porting applications written in .Net and Mono to the iPhone. In other words, De Icaza, who heads the Mono project which is developing an open source clone of parts of the .Net development environment, is acting as a proxy to develop tools to help Microsoft to fight in Apple's space.
SCO played a similar role when it began its now infamous case against Linux.
De Icaza
greeted the CodePlex announcement as another "step in the right direction" by Microsoft. If one is inclined to believe him - and there are some in the FOSS community who still live and die by his every word - then this is one move by Microsoft towards becoming " a full member of the open source community".
De Icaza is one of the
board members of the CodePlex Foundation. He is credited with being the "creator of Gnome" by the foundation though he is a co-founder of the project, the other founder being Federico Mena Quintero. The Foundation has also highlighted the fact that De Icaza received an award from the Free Software Foundation in 1999 - though if he is a "passionate and long-standing advocate for open source" one would be more inclined to ask why he hasn't received any recognition since.
The short bio also says: "Miguel works on the Mono project, an implementation of Microsoft's new .NET development platform on Linux, and on Moonlight, a Silverlight implementation on Mono." IIt would again be more correct to describe Mono as a ceaseless attempt to play catch up with .Net.
(I'm waiting to see whether De Icaza, who paints himself as the soul of integrity, will ask his buddies at Microsoft to correct these mistakes.)
CONTINUED
